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FRIDAY, JANUARY 30, 2004

NATIONAL REPORT EXAMINES NORTH CAROLINA’S

STATE-PROVIDED HEALTH CARE

WASHINGTON, D.C. (January 30, 2004) – An assessment of health care in the 50 states, released here today, found that North Carolina has been making impressive efforts in child health. The report appears in the February issue of Governing Magazine.

“There’s no question that North Carolina still has a long way to go,” said Katherine Barrett, co-author of the report. “For example, the percentage of low birth weight babies and the infant mortality rates are still very high. But the state is definitely moving in the right direction.” Barrett cited North Carolina’s long-standing Baby Love program for its success in providing outreach and case management services to low-income women who are pregnant or have just delivered. The infant mortality rate for children who receive Medicaid fell from 14.9 per thousand in 1987 to 8.6 per thousand in 2000.

North Carolina also has the fourth best record in the country for childhood immunizations, significantly better than its neighbor to the north, Virginia, which is 38^th.” Part of the reason for the state’s success in this area is its relatively unusual no-cost vaccine program, available to all children in the state. The state has also made strides in promoting better access to dental care for children. “This area is a shortcoming in many other states, which have major problems in getting dentists to take patients who are on Medicaid,” Barrett added.

One area in which the news is relatively bleak is in the numbers of uninsured in the state. North Carolina had a 1.6 percentage point increase in the rates of uninsured from 2000-2001 to 2001-2002. That was a bigger than any state except for Mississippi.

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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