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Janet Firshein or Joe Sutherland at 301/652-1558

FOR RELEASE WITH A.M. PAPERS ON

FRIDAY, JANUARY 30, 2004

NATIONAL REPORT FAULTS CONNECTICUT FOR APPROACH

TO CUTTING CHILDREN’S HEALTH SERVICES

WASHINGTON, D.C. (January 30, 2004) – An assessment of health care in the 50 states, released here today, finds that Connecticut has cut back on the numbers of children covered through public insurance, by making it harder to stay enrolled. The report cites the state’s new requirement that parents document eligibility every six months instead of annually. It appears in the February 2004 issue of Governing magazine.

“The more paperwork you require, the more likely that children will lose coverage. It’s kind of a back-door way to cut back, ” said Katherine Barrett, co-author of the report, which notes that a number of states have taken steps to complicate the application and renewal process, reversing past efforts at simplifying it. “You really want children to have consistent coverage and this just leads to people bouncing into and out of the program. And the state ends up paying for the uninsured in any case.”

Connecticut has the 15th-lowest rate of uninsured children in the United States, but it lags behind other New England states, which tend to perform better than the rest of the country. Vermont was first in the country in this indictor, Rhode Island was third, Massachusetts was sixth, New Hampshire was eighth and Maine was 11th according to data compiled by the Kaiser Commission on Medicaid and the Uninsured.

The report also noted that Connecticut has an older population than the U.S. average and that its Medicaid spending is somewhat skewed toward long-term care, with 54 percent of total Medicaid spending going to this source in 2001. The U.S. average was 35 percent. About 6.3 percent of its over-65 population lives in nursing facilities, the third-highest percent in the nation, according to AARP.

The state earned praise for its efforts in expanding home and community services, and increasing the availability of assisted-living facilities. Connecticut also has done a good job in promoting long-term care insurance, which will help to defray public spending in the future, and in fighting to strengthen currently toothless penalties for older individuals who transfer assets to children to qualify for Medicaid.

Governing’s analysis of state-funded health care is part of the Government Performance Project, a six-year-old effort, funded by the Pew Charitable Trusts, to evaluate a wide range of state government management and policy functions. This year’s special report focuses on six critical health care problems facing states: long-term care, public health, mental health, prescription drugs, access to care for the uninsured, and care for children.

The Government Performance Project found and documented the inability of the 50 states’ healthcare system to deliver improvements in medicine fairly and consistently to many of their citizens. Health care in most states is not just inadequate, the study concluded--it’s deteriorating. “After exhaustive analysis and hundreds of interviews,” says Peter Harkness, Governing’s publisher and editor, “it became clear that there is a health care crisis in America. But it is in no way a medical crisis. It is a fiscal crisis.”

Governing is a policy and management magazine aimed at high-level state and local government officials. An online version of this report will be available at http://www.governing.com/gpp/2004/intro.htm as of January 29. Press releases for each of the 50 states can be found at http://www.governing.com/gpp/2004/press.htm..