by Anthony Hennen
The U.S. Department of Agriculture has announced $110 million in grants for rural health care, and Pennsylvania will receive almost $2 million to replace lost revenue and supply other needs.
The three grants for $1.8 million will go to two health care groups and a food bank in Elk, McKean, and Chester counties.
“Emergency Rural Health Care Grants support rural communities in providing health care to the people and places that often lack access,” USDA Rural Development State Director Bob Morgan said in a press release.
The Elk Haven Nursing Home Association will get $767,000 for revenue lost during the pandemic and will use it to promote COVID-19 testing and vaccination.
The city of Bradford received $105,000 for an ambulance; currently, EMS responds to 2,200 calls annually with three ambulances. A recent merger between the Bradford Regional Medical Center and Olean General Hospital means that more services are provided across the border in New York, necessitating longer drives for medical care.
As inflation remains high and food prices rise with it, the Chester County Food Bank was awarded a $1 million grant to cover food purchases and meet the increase in food assistance requests.
The Emergency Rural Health Care Grant Program is a $500 million national program created by the American Rescue Plan Act in 2021 that is funded through 2023. A previous round of awards in April brought $10 million to Pennsylvania. To date, 34 projects in the commonwealth have received $16.4 million.
“A lot of our nursing homes in rural communities, they have very tight budgets under normal circumstances. The pandemic just added strain that nobody had anticipated,” Morgan said. “We try to … help those communities that are really feeling that lost revenue.”
As Pennsylvania’s population has shifted toward the suburbs and the east, rural population loss has left areas older and with a shrinking tax base. Lawmakers have said the commonwealth’s EMS system is “in jeopardy,” as The Center Square previously reported, and local communities have turned to the state and federal government to cover the costs.
“This really helps them … improve their level of service they can offer,” Morgan said. “I look at the map in front of me in my office and there are broad swaths of Pennsylvania that are forestland and are game lands, but people use those lands, and they attract tourists. It’s not just the 20,000 people who live in Forest County that we’re providing service to. It’s the visitors to Forest or McKean or Elk that come in, and visitors hurt themselves too.”
Beyond health care grants, the USDA has also dedicated $82 million for their Community Facilities Program in Pennsylvania in fiscal year 2022, with about 65% of that money awarded as loans to be repaid. Those funds can be used for health care facilities, town halls, community centers, libraries, and public safety services, among other qualifying needs.
That sort of funding, however, is filling gaps, not permanently fixing them everywhere. The situation in much of rural Pennsylvania mirrors the area where Morgan lives.
“Homes start to get spread out, and the tax base by number of taxpayers gets smaller because the population gets smaller. As a result of that, the needs don’t go away,” he said.
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Anthony Hennen is a reporter for The Center Square. Previously, he worked for Philadelphia Weekly and the James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal. He is managing editor of Expatalachians, a journalism project focused on the Appalachian region.
