Impact of Health Reform on Rural Areas: Lessons From the States (Part 5 of 8)

There is very little literature on the impact of the specific types of health changes and reforms in rural areas that are currently being debated by Congress. Most of the information in this paper is drown from conversations with researchers, policymakers, and other experts; and from a small workshop at which several state legislators and other policymakers shared and contrasted their states’ experiences with the impact of broad reforms on rural areas (see appendix A).2 These experts and policymakers were not randomly selected, and they do not necessarily represent all experiences and opinions. Nonetheless, the issues they raised, and the diversity of experiences they presented, imply that systemwide reforms can have different impacts on rural than on urban areas, and that these differences merit attention.