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FRIDAY, JANUARY 30, 2004

NATIONAL REPORT CRITICIZES OKLAHOMA

FOR HIGH NUMBERS OF UNINSURED ADULTS

WASHINGTON, D.C. (January 30, 2004) – An assessment of health care in the 50 states, released here today, criticizes Oklahoma for its high rate of uninsured adults, a situation that is likely to worsen given the state’s decision to drop coverage for the medically needy. These are individuals who reach Medicaid eligibility limits by virtue of their high health care bills. The article appears in the February 2004 issue of Governing magazine.

According to data compiled by the Kaiser Commission on Medicaid and the Uninsured, only three states – New Mexico, Texas and Louisiana – are worse off in terms of the percentage of the adult non-elderly population who are uninsured. Oklahoma and California both have uninsured rates of 23.5 percent for non-elderly adults. “Oklahoma really should be doing better because it has more people who receive coverage from private employers than in the other states at the bottom,” says Katherine Barrett, co-author of the report. “Ultimately, states with high numbers of uninsured wind up paying anyhow if these people wind up in emergency rooms or find themselves in some kind of medical crisis that requires hospitalization.”

The state has been considering reforming its Medicaid system so that limited dollars can be stretched to help parts of the population that aren’t covered now.

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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