Patient Power

Ranking state health care policies

The Pacific Research Institute has released its 2008 U.S. Index of Health Ownership, which “measures the degree to which individuals, be they patients, health professionals, entrepreneurs, or taxpayers, ‘own’ the health care in their states.”  From the report:

Perhaps the best way to understand this concept is through examples of what health ownership is not:

• A disabled Medicaid beneficiary receives living assistance from a nursing aide in her home. State Medicaid bureaucrats decide whom to send into her home, irrespective of whether the Medicaid beneficiary prefers another nursing aide at the same cost.
• A privately insured patient would like to buy a low-premium health plan coupled with a Health Savings Account (HSA). However, his state’s insurance regulations prevent him from doing so.
• A group of surgeons want to invest in a clinic where they can conduct operations pertinent to their specialty. The local acute-care hospital invokes state power to prevent this.
• An obstetrician, mindful of research that indicates caesarian sections should be performed only in certain cases, nevertheless performs them to a much greater degree than warranted, because not doing so puts him at serious risk of being victimized by a baseless, but nevertheless costly, medical malpractice suit.
• A nurse practitioner wants to establish a clinic to treat patients within her scope of competence and professional ethics, at low cost, but the state requires her to be closely supervised by an MD, thus making the enterprise commercially impractical.

In all these cases, the state has prevented individuals from acting in their own interests without harming others. Indeed, in all these cases, allowing these parties to act free of government control would improve health care in the state.

Overall, Alabama was ranked first, New York last, and Colorado 21st.  In the government health care category, Colorado ranked 3rd, “performing well on Medicaid managed care enrollment, while limiting SCHIP enrollment.”

(via StateHouseCall)

• Democratic Senators on Health & Human Services Senate Committee
• Colorado Medicaid errors far exceed commercial insurers’
• Ritter increases your insurance premiums
• Colorado HB 1293: Prepare For More Expensive Medical Insurance
• Colorado SCHIP “like a kind of mess”