STATEMENT OF 
COMMISSIONER MICHAEL J. COPPS
Re:  In the Matter of Rural Health Care Support Mechanism, WC Docket No. 02-60
Since I came to the Commission, I have been pushing for more proactive 
programs to put our rural health care dollars to work bringing advanced 
telecommunications to health care facilities in towns and villages across America.  I have 
visited numerous such facilities, and I quickly came to understand both their plight and 
their potential.  Their plight is lack of dollars to develop and deploy rural health 
communications, lack of partners, lack of sufficient personnel, and lack of a real helping 
hand from the federal government.  Their potential is to improve health care in often less-
than-affluent communities and to enhance public safety by connecting health care 
providers, first responders and rural citizens everywhere.
The Commission is finally tapping into the long underutilized Universal Service 
system’s rural health care support mechanism to tackle these challenges. We today 
approve the disbursement of more than $400 million over the next three years to 
approved health care providers who plan to build a broadband infrastructure that will 
connect over 6,000 facilities in 42 states and 3 U.S. territories.  I am enormously pleased 
to support this Order, and I want to commend Chairman Martin and all my colleagues for 
their leadership in developing and bringing this important pilot program to reality.
It is sad but true that rural America lags the rest of the country in access to first-
rate health care.  That’s bad news for so prosperous a nation as ours.  This pilot program 
creatively pushes the envelope in an effort to spur the development of tele-medicine 
programs to better serve rural America.  Having seen first-hand the difference that tele-
medicine and tele-health can have on the well-being of our citizens who live hundreds of 
miles from the nearest hospital and are injured or just need to cure a child’s ear infection, 
tele-medicine can be life-altering, and sometimes even life-saving.  We also know that if 
a health catastrophe visited many of our rural areas today, our rural health care system 
would not generally be equipped to deal with it.  Anyone who believes that terrorists, for 
example, are only going to focus on urban America is engaged in wrong and potentially 
fatal reasoning.
So I welcome and enthusiastically support this important initiative, believing it 
has the very real potential to kick-start badly needed rural-health infrastructure building.  
Once these pilot programs are under-way, monitoring them becomes critical.  I will be 
doing everything I can to work with the Bureau and my colleagues to make sure we learn 
the lessons we need to learn and then develop permanent programs to bring these 
capabilities and services to the many rural communities that are not part of this pilot 
program. Today we make a good and noble start – but it is a beginning only, and much 
remains to be done to integrate our rural health care facilities and providers into our 
nationwide health care system.