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Janet Firshein or Joe Sutherland at 301/652-1558

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FRIDAY, JANUARY 30, 2004

NATIONAL REPORT EXAMINES KANSAS’S

STATE-PROVIDED HEALTH CARE

WASHINGTON, D.C. (January 30, 2004) – An assessment of health care in the 50 states, released here today, reports that Kansas is one of the states that is moving most aggressively away from institutionally-based long-term care services, in favor of home and community care. Only 10 states spent a higher percentage of their long-term care dollars on home care in 2002.

The report appears in the February 2004 issue of Governing magazine.

“The state still has a pretty high percentage of its older population in nursing homes – the fourth highest in the United States,” said Katherine Barrett, co-author of the report. “But that’s very typical of Midwestern states. Ohio, Indiana and Iowa are also all in the top ten of nursing home placements.”

The state’s efforts to offer home and community-based options to its elderly and disabled citizens who need long-term care have not translated into cost savings on the institutional side, the report noted. “In general one of the big problems the states face is that even when they take laudable steps to offer a greater number of options to the elderly and disabled who need long-term care, they don’t necessarily see a cutback on the money they’re spending,” added Barrett. In fact, Kansas is one of a half dozen states in which long-term care spending eats up more than half of all Medicaid dollars.

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.

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