Connecticut Ranks Eighth in New State Health Care Scoreboard
HEALTHCARE SCOREBOARD
Norwalk Hour
Katerina Voutsina
Boston University Washington News Service
10/07/2009
WASHINGTON—Connecticut ranks eighth among the states in health care quality in a report released Thursday by the independent Commonwealth Fund.
The report, Aiming Higher: Results from the 2009 State Scoreboard on Health System Performance, is a follow-up to the commission’s 2007 State Scoreboard.
“The goal of the analysis is to examine how states have done, where they have set new benchmarks that we all can see that now are achievable, to spur action and focus on aiming higher in health industry,” said Cathy Schoen, the fund’s senior vice president, in a conference call Wednesday.
The 2009 scoreboard includes 38 indicators grouped into five dimensions of health care performance – access, prevention and treatment, avoidable hospital use and costs, equity and healthy lives.
According to the report, Connecticut ranks first in insurance coverage, having improved its position by three places since 2007.
“Insurance is also critical, because it is the way we pay for care,” Schoen said, adding that even in Connecticut there is still room for improvement, especially regarding the increasing numbers of uninsured adults in the state.
Connecticut also improved in the coverage of low-income adults, moving up 18 places since 2007 to 9th in 2009.
“We need hospitals to have all patients that come in their door be ’paying patients’ and pay in a similar way,” Schoen said. “Otherwise we try to run different care systems within the hospital to collect money.”
She added that the nation spends a lot of money on medical debt collection. “No other country has this, and it is a hidden cost of a very fragmented insurance system that has multiple people racing to catch up,” she said.
Connecticut ranked third in access to health care and healthy lives, sixth in equity, 11th in prevention and treatment and 32nd in avoidable hospital use and costs.
“Unless people are securely insured – meaning that they don’t lose their coverage on a frequent basis and they have coverage that covers their health care needs and protects them financially – they don’t stay in the health care system, they come in and out,” Schoen said.
New England states ranked high in the report. Vermont ranked at the top of the list and Maine, New Hampshire, Connecticut and Rhode Island are all in the top 25 percent. Mississippi is ranked last of all the states.
The fund is a private foundation that supports independent research on health policy reform and performance.
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