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FRIDAY, JANUARY 30, 2004

NATIONAL REPORT PRAISES NEBRASKA

AS A LEADER IN PUBLIC HEALTH SERVICES

WASHINGTON, D.C. (January 30, 2004) – An assessment of health care in the 50 states, released here today, singles out Nebraska as a pioneer in the field of public health, leading other states in its successful efforts to develop a local component to its public health system. This provides citizens with broad improvements to such services as health education, disease investigation and enforcement of public health laws. The report appears in the February 2004 issue of Governing magazine.

“Many public health services are most effectively delivered at the local level, and all the states know that. But many simply don’t have the network of local health departments that allows them to take advantage of that information,” said Michele Mariani, co-author of the report. “They’re keeping their eyes on Nebraska, which is a model in how to build a system almost from scratch.”

In 2000, Nebraska had only 16 local health departments, which served 22 of the state’s 93 counties. With funding from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the state’s tobacco settlement, Nebraska created 14 new local health departments and restructured two others over the past three years.

Each of the departments serves at least 30,000 Nebraskans, operates under a local board of health and receives between $160,000 and $850,000 annually from the state to provide public health services. The departments can provide service to nearly every resident of the state. By the end of last year, 90 percent of the counties were receiving services through the state appropriation, and another eight were independently funded.

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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