Now Available
Disparities in State Health Coverage Report

WASHINGTON, January 5 - The State Coverage Initiatives (SCI) program --- an initiative of The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation --- today released a new report, "Disparities in State Health Coverage: A Matter of Policy or Fortune?"

Written by Christopher Trenholm and Susanna Kung of Mathematica Policy Research, Inc., in Princeton, N.J., the report explores the reasons why states differ in their Medicaid coverage of the at-risk population, focusing in particular on the large disparities in Medicaid spending associated with these differences.

"Many view the dramatic disparities in states' coverage of low-income families as an inevitable consequence of differences in states' wealth," notes Trenholm, an economist at Mathematica and lead author of the report. "These disparities, however, are also due to state spending priorities --- that is, how much of a state's wealth is allocated toward public coverage --- as well as current federal policy, which fails to account for the level of need for public coverage when re-distributing Medicaid and SCHIP dollars to states."

The authors provide several recommendations that may help to address the disparities in health care coverage among states. One approach would reconfigure the federal matching formula for Medicaid so that it accounts for the relative need for public coverage in each state. Another would provide federal subsidies to low-income families for the purchase of health insurance coverage.

The report is available on the SCI Web site at www.statecoverage.net/pdf/disparities.pdf. Send requests for hard copies to leanne.defrancesco@academyhealth.org.

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The AcademyHealth (www.academyhealth.org) is the national program office for State Coverage Initiatives. Through providing grants, technical assistance, workshops, and information on best practices, SCI helps to build the policy making and technical capacity of states to address their own unique health care coverage issues.

Mathematica, one of the nation's leading independent research firms, conducts policy research and surveys for federal and state governments, foundations, and private-sector clients. The employee-owned firm strives to improve public well-being by bringing the highest standards of quality, objectivity, and excellence to bear on the provision of information collection and analysis to its clients.

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