New Mexico Health Care Authority releases $50M to rural health care providers

The New Mexico Health Care Authority this week announced it had identified recipients of $50 million the Legislature approved in a special session late last year aimed at staving off rural healthcare impacts from the “One Big Beautiful Bill Act.”

Senate Bill 1, which passed nearly unanimously during the October 2025 special legislative session, transferred $50 million to the existing Rural Healthcare Delivery Fund and allowed the Health Care Authority to use the funds for “stabilization” of healthcare services, not just for new and expanding services. 

The funds were needed, legislative sponsors and Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham said at the time, to offset potential impacts in the federal spending bill, including cuts to Medicaid, and provide providers with some certainty as they braced for impacts from the spending bill. 

The Health Care Authority in March opened applications for the new funding and announced this week that 41 recipients received funding across rural New Mexico. 

Two providers that received the funds told Source NM on Wednesday that they will use the funding, which will be awarded over the course of three years, to recruit and retain employees in hopes of meeting growing demand. 

Serving People In Need, a behavioral healthcare provider serving primarily unhoused people in Luna, Grant and Hidalgo counties, received $2.1 million, according to Director Christina Castillo. That amount is slightly more than her organization asked for, she said. 

“It’s huge,” she said of the funding, which amounts to roughly 30% of her organization’s annual operating budget. “If they were out to stabilize some stuff, they did that.”

The funds will be particularly helpful for the organizations’ 24-hour emergency homeless shelter, she said, which the organization generally pays for without the help of federal or state funding. Castillo also said she’ll use the funding toward retirement accounts for current and new employees. 

“We have really good employees, but we’re missing the clinical,” she said. “We need more clinicians.”

Her organization served 800 unique clients in 2025, she said, across 10,000 visits. 

Ruth Macy, owner of Building Bridges Counseling Service in Hobbs, said she needs the $1 million in funding to hire more therapists for clients, who are children and teenagers. At the moment, she has one full-time and one part-time therapist serving roughly 60 kids, and the waiting list is a year. 

Since the federal spending bill went into effect last year, she said, she’s noticed an uptick in denials for reimbursement for her clients who receive Medicaid. The state funding will enable her to pay therapists’ salaries and 15% of their healthcare premiums, she said. 

“We’re in Lea County. I mean, rural areas don’t attract people just out of school,” she said. “And of course we have to have a licensed clinical social worker or a counseling license. So we have to draw those type of people, which is very difficult.”