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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 INDIANA 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 Indiana has cut back on the numbers of children covered through public insurance, by making it harder to stay enrolled. The report, which criticizes the state’s new requirement that parents document eligibility every six months instead of annually, 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,” says 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 if any of these uncovered children wind up getting seriously ill, the state will likely wind up paying for their care.”

The magazine noted that Indiana was one of 18 states that had a statistically significant increase in the numbers of uninsured generally as measured by the Census Bureau over a two year period, 2001-02. “But the state is well aware of the problem,” says Barrett, “and it has a very active research project to study and come up with solutions to the problem of the uninsured.”

The report also looked at long-term care, where state officials acknowledged the state “is pretty far behind.” Indiana devotes 83.7 percent of its long-term Medicaid spending to institutional care, far higher than all but a handful of other states. It has begun to shift toward more home and community-based care, however, with a promising nursing home diversion program

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’ health care 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.

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