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FOR RELEASE WITH A.M. PAPERS ON

FRIDAY, JANUARY 30, 2004

NATIONAL REPORT EXAMINES MARYLAND’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 Maryland is one of the states that had the biggest jumps in percentage of the uninsured in recent years. The article appears in the February 2004 issue of Governing magazine.

According to two-year average figures compiled by the U.S. Census Bureau, the uninsured rates for non-elderly adults jumped from 12.8 to 14.4 percent. This percentage point change for the 2001-2002 period was larger than in any state except Nevada, North Carolina and Mississippi. Fortunately, the state has a policy that requires its hospitals give residents access regardless of their ability to pay. Unlike other states, tightly regulated hospital rates in Maryland include a factor that contributes to the pool of funds available for uncompensated care.

“While it’s certainly true that this increase in uninsured is pretty dramatic, the good news is that Maryland’s leadership is focused on the problem, which is affecting every state in the country,” said Katherine Barrett, co-author of the report. “In fact, there was a health summit in Maryland to talk about a variety of options and the state’s health secretary has been floating a proposal that would attempt to get to universal coverage for Maryland residents.”

Maryland was one of six states to freeze enrollment in its Children’s Health Insurance Program in 2003, but the report’s authors indicated that this was not as troublesome an issue as in the five other states that took similar action. That’s because Maryland’s Medicaid program reaches children at a much higher income level than many other states. The freeze only affects children whose family incomes are between 200 and 300 percent of the poverty level. The other five states that froze enrollment – Alabama, Colorado, Florida, Montana and Utah – have much less generous Medicaid programs.

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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