Louisiana will get more than $208 million from the federal Rural Health Transformation Program, which the state plans to spend on efforts like treating chronic health conditions, recruiting and retaining doctors and nurses and shoring up hospitals and health clinics, officials announced Monday.

The $10 billion program was created in the Working Families Tax Cuts Act — otherwise known as the “One Big, Beautiful Bill” — that enacted much of President Donald Trump’s domestic agenda.

Louisiana’s share of the program is “among the highest in the nation,” the Louisiana Department of Health said in a news release. Nearly 1.1 million people live in rural parishes, more than a third are on Medicaid and more than one in five are covered by Medicare.

“The use of this funding will transform lives through innovative approaches to improve healthcare access in rural communities across the state,” said Secretary of Health Bruce Greenstein in the release.

The rural health program was created to address concerns that tighter restrictions on Medicaid, enacted in the same law, would leave more people without health insurance and potentially deal a huge financial blow to already-struggling rural health care providers.

Louisiana gets a big share

The way the program is structured benefits Louisiana.

Half the money will be distributed equally across states, regardless of size, and the rest will be distributed based on a formula developed by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services that considers rural population size, the financial health of a state’s medical facilities and health outcomes for a state’s population.

That formula ties $12 billion of the five-year funding to whether states are implementing health policies prioritized by the Trump administration’s “Make America Healthy Again” initiative. Examples include requiring nutrition education for health care providers, having schools participate in the Presidential Fitness Test or banning the use of food stamp benefits for soda, candy and other “junk foods,” according to Medicaid administrator Mehmet Oz.

Louisiana has already enacted many of those policies.

Democratic-led states have argued the formula is unfair to larger states that don’t agree with the president’s health agenda. And some Democratic officials and health care leaders have argued that the fund isn’t enough to offset looming Medicaid cuts.

Where the money will go

In the news release, the Department of Health laid out four “key groups” for the program.

• Rural residents with chronic or complex conditions like hypertension and diabetes,

• People who need coordinated care across multiple providers, like those with behavioral health needs, perinatal or postpartum risks and cancer,

• The rural health care workforce, which is facing “persistent recruitment and retention challenges,”

• Rural healthcare facilities like clinics, critical access hospitals, and community-based organizations.

“I look forward to working closely with rural communities across the state to build relationships and to use this amazing funding opportunity to change how healthcare is provided and accessed in those communities,” said Julie Foster Hagan, executive director for the Rural Health Transformation Program.

The Associated Press contributed to this story.