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FRIDAY, JANUARY 30, 2004

NATIONAL REPORT EXAMINES MONTANA’S

CUTS IN CHILDREN’S HEALTH SERVICES

WASHINGTON, D.C. (January 30, 2004) – An assessment of health care in the 50 states, released here today, faults Montana for freezing enrollment in its Children’s Health Insurance Program last year. In so doing, it joined a national trend to cut back on coverage for children, even though experts agree that such an approach is likely to cost more in the long term. The report appears in the February 2004 issue of Governing magazine.

“The states that froze enrollment backed away from making hard decisions about eligibility,” says Katherine Barrett, co-author of the report. “On the other hand, the situation in Montana was somewhat alleviated at the end of last year when the Governor allotted some $609,000 in one-time money to cover children who were then on the waiting list for the Children’s Health Insurance Program.”

Montana was one of six states that froze enrollment last year. The others were Alabama, Colorado, Florida, Maryland and Utah, “though Maryland’s Medicaid program has a much higher eligibility level than the rest, so the freeze in CHIP was not nearly as damaging,” added Barrett.

Montana’s program is currently near capacity, but state officials believe that they’ll be able to serve the children who apply during the current fiscal year.

The authors noted that Montana offers Medicaid coverage to children only at the federally-required minimum level and was never generous in its eligibility levels for the Children’s Health Insurance Program. Only nine states have a higher percentage of uninsured children.

On the positive side, Barrett said that the state is currently undergoing a major study of its publicly funded health care systems with an eye toward improving health policy decisions.

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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