By Matthew Young
For HDMedia
A higher percentage of West Virginians are obese than in any other part of the country. With the state now poised to lose hundreds of millions of dollars annually in federal health care funding, Gov. Patrick Morrisey plans to embrace a “food-is-medicine” movement to bridge the gap and make the state’s residents healthier so they’re less reliant on the health care system. As of early December, 41.4% of West Virginians were considered medically-obese, according to the Centers of Disease Control and Prevention. That represents the highest percentage in the United States. And while heart disease remains the leading cause of death in West Virginia, the American Diabetes Association also reports nearly 260,000 adults in the state have been diagnosed with diabetes, with as many as 15,000 more being diagnosed with the disease each year.
Rural Health Transformation
With the promise of $199.5 million in federal funding provided through the Rural Healthcare Transformation Program, Morrisey announced in December a “transformative foundation to improve health outcomes” across West Virginia. Created as part of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, the RHTP guarantees each state at least $100 million a year for five years to be used for the betterment of rural health outcomes. “This award positions our state to deliver better care closer to home and build a healthier future for generations to come,” Morrisey said. But some are skeptical. According to a report from Families USA, a national health care-access advocacy agency and a partner of the West Virginia Center on Budget & Policy, the OBBBA, “Makes the largest cut to Medicaid in history, gutting a whopping $859 billion from Medicaid and the low-income families, workers, veterans and people with disabilities who rely on it for their care, including over 500,000 children and adults in West Virginia.” The reporting from Families USA further shows that at least 69,000 West Virginians will lose their access to health coverage under the OBBBA, increasing the state’s uninsured rate by 70%. These losses in health coverage, combined with funding cuts made through the OBBBA to other social programs such as SNAP, could have a chilling effect on hospitals and health care providers, resulting in losses to the state that some estimates show to be as high as $1 billion annually. Mountain State Spotlight reported in December that state officials completed their own study of the OBBBA’s impact on West Virginia; however, those officials have declined to make that study public.
Filling a $1B hole with $200M
A key component of West Virginia’s planned “transformative foundation” is the concept of “food is
medicine.” This idea is part of a larger measure which West Virginia Secretary of Health Arvin Singh explains as, “preventing adverse health outcomes through nutrition exercise, and lifestyle changes.” In theory, exercising and eating healthier foods should lead to better health outcomes. This is a policy Morrisey has implemented since first jokingly asking Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy to be his
“personal trainer” during a joint news conference in Martinsburg in March 2025. It was also at that news conference when Morrisey first made mention of his “Mountaineer Mile” daily walking routine.
Within six months, it was an announced by his administration that sugary soft drinks would soon be made ineligible for purchase through the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, also known as food stamps. That restriction became effective Jan. 1. Other initiatives are underway. “In West Virginia, we have a Food is Medicine Coalition,” Rich Sutphin, executive director of the West Virginia Rural Health Association, told HD Media Thursday. “It works closely with the WVU Extension and the SNAP-Ed program, which hasn’t received funding this year. One of the things that it’s doing is creating opportunities for young kids to grow their own vegetables.” In addition to the WVU Extension and SNAP-Ed, the Food is Medicine Coalition partners with, among others, WVU Medicine, the West Virginia Department of Health and Mountaineer Food Bank. “The way insurers are looking at food is medicine, they’re offering incentives for people to engage with Medicaid to offer food boxes [home-delivered healthy or medically tailored meals] and those types of things, to get fresh and healthy foods into the hands of the people who need them,” Sutphin said. The “food-is-medicine” concept is part of the broader “Health to Prosperity Pipeline” — one of the “seven pillars” Morrisey outlined in his supplemental RHT application Those pillars are:
Connected Care Grid: Build the infrastructure to bring virtual and in-person care access to people on demand.
Rural Health Link: Transport: West Virginians to care when it’s needed.
Mountain State Care Force: Recruit, train and retain the health care workforce of the future.
Smart Care Catalyst: Support tech-enabled innovation and regulatory relief.
Personal Health Accelerator: Empower healthy living through food as medicine, movement and local partnerships.
HealthTech Appalachia: Promote leapfrog technologies that innovate health care delivery and produce economic growth.
Health to Prosperity Pipeline: Help West Virginians rebuild health, rejoin the workforce and thrive in their communities.
“I think the goal of the RHT Program is to create a system that will allow health systems to operate more efficiently through better access to care,” Sutphin said. “When you’re looking at the raw numbers, it’s difficult to see that [$100 million or more] a year for five years is not going to replace what we’re expecting to lose over the long run.” “Hopefully, as this program is implemented,” Sutphin said, “we will see West Virginians getting back into the workforce, and have access to health insurance that they may not have had access to before. Then we can rely less on Medicaid, and put it back as the safety-net
that it should be.”
Legislative efforts
There are 192 health-related bills currently pending before the state legislature, with 90 of them assigned to the Senate’s Health and Human Resources Committee. One bill in the committee is House Bill 4196, which seeks to provide reversible contraception to patients currently undergoing methadone and Suboxone treatment. Having passed the House on Jan. 27, Senate Health and Human Resources Committee Chair Brian Helton, R-Fayette, says the bill falls in line with his approach to reducing the state’s health care expenses by providing more cost-effective care to those recovering from addiction. The logic behind HB 4196 — should it become law — is that the cost of contraceptive products is substantially lower than that of OB/GYN services. West Virginia’s fiscal year 2027 budget is currently under legislative review with a finished product expected before the end of the session on March 14. “There’s really two parts of the [budget] bill,” Helton said. “One of those parts is on our [Health and Human Resources Committee] end, and it’s to deal with things like the requirements for the results-based performance and outcomes, the Presidential Fitness Test, those sorts of things.” Aside from the Presidential Fitness Test — which was discontinued in the early 2010s, but brought back in 2025 through a presidential executive order — the “sorts of things” Helton referred to include establishing mechanisms by which West Virginia will track its progress in lowering diabetes and obesity rates. “Then the other part of the bill is with [the Senate Finance Committee], and they’ll set the spending-parameters for the $199 million,” Helton added. “[Supplemental RHT funding beyond the guaranteed $100 million is] really set up from a standpoint of how well you do with what you’re given. “It’s awarding the states that perform well in the metrics, and granting the money based on those results,” Helton said. “The reason we got that extra [$99.5 million] was because of … the legislature working through how those items fit into our rural healthcare model.” While Helton added that West Virginia could run afoul of the federal government should it fail to maintain a “legislative approach” to the RHT Program, right now he said the state is in the “sweet spot” in terms of funding. “We’re within the guidelines that are needed,” Helton said. “We’re in good shape.”