Under the One Big Beautiful Bill Act of 2025, President Donald Trump has directed the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) to allocate $10 billion annually for the next five years to advance rural health transformation and sustainability.
This funding is administered through the Rural Health Transformation Program (RHTP), a federal-state partnership where the agency sets the guidelines while states decide how to distribute the money to local providers. Wyoming is set to receive a proportionately large share, receiving $200 million to serve its roughly 500,000 residents within the state borders.
The Rural Health Transformation Program (RHTP) was a sort of offset to the cuts to Medicaid included in the same legislation that will hit rural areas more significantly, as those geographies tend to have health systems and providers more dependent on government-provided health care coverage such as Medicaid, Medicare, and children’s insurance programs.
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Five Priorities for Rural Transformation
The agency outlines five specific categories of focus for the program.
The first, “Bring More Care Within Reach,” encourages expanding preventive, primary, maternal, and behavioral health services. Programs approved under this umbrella may include food-as-medicine initiatives and chronic disease prevention models. Community pharmacies are positioned as local access points for these services, offering immunizations, test-to-treat options, medication optimization, and screening for social determinants of health.
The second category targets workforce sustainability. The agency is pushing for support in clinical training, residencies, and recruitment incentives to keep health professionals in their home communities.
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The third area involves modernizing rural infrastructure and technology. This includes strengthening cybersecurity, expanding broadband access to frontier pharmacies, and utilizing digital tools to enable telehealth. The goal is to ensure that technology transcends geography to provide timely access to care.
The fourth category focuses on structural efficiency through hub-and-spoke models and rural regional centers of excellence.
As the most frontline of frontline care providers, pharmacies are often the most proximal brick-and-mortar walk-in providers to residents in rural communities.