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FRIDAY, JANUARY 30, 2004

NATIONAL REPORT PRAISES WISCONSIN FOR

SUPERIOR APPROACH TO PUBLIC HEALTH

WASHINGTON, D.C. (January 30, 2004) – An assessment of health care in the 50 states, released here today, singles out Wisconsin for its efforts in the field of public health. The report, which touts Wisconsin’s decision to require that local health department funding be tied to pre-established goals, appears in the February 2004 issue of Governing magazine.

“Usually, public health services are most effectively delivered at the local level, and all the states know that,” said Michele Mariani, co-author of the special issue of Governing. “But few of them hold their local counterparts accountable the way Wisconsin does. The state’s accreditation program is a true success in encouraging local governments to provide their residents with more public health services.”

Accreditation in Wisconsin is awarded to local health departments at Levels 1, 2 and 3. Level 1 certification indicates an ability to provide basic public health services; Levels 2 and 3 denote increasing capacity to attain additional goals and objectives. State health department employees conduct site visits to certify each local health department as meeting one of the levels.

This accreditation process is an incentive for localities to better their performance, Governing’s report notes, because they receive more state funding when they achieve certification at a higher level. Although all localities have been designated Level 1--were they to miss that goal they wouldn’t get any funding at all--some 85 percent of the local departments have now achieved accreditation Level 2 or 3.

The report also notes that Wisconsin uses a similar kind of incentive-based approach in offering financial incentives to managed care programs that improve their performance.

Governing gave Wisconsin additional accolades for its emphasis on family coverage, which provides public insurance to parents at higher levels of income than most other states. The report notes, “When parents are insured, children also end up getting better preventive medical care.”

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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