Alaska

Health policy rankings

Health indicators	Rank
Population	641,596
Number of insurance mandates	28
Death rate per 100,000	749.5
Percent of adults overweight or obese	62.40%
Percent of adults who have visited a dentist in the last 12 months	69.60%
Numberof births (2004)	10,338

Ranking public policy	Rank
Overall health ownership rank	31
Government health care rank	47
Private health insurance rank	28
Medical tort rank	9
Provider burden of regulation rank	10

Sources

Policy ranks are from the U.S. Index of Health Ownership, published by the* Pacific Research Institute.
Health indicators are from State Health Facts, a service of the Kaiser Family Foundation.
Number of insurance mandates comes from Health Insurance Mandates in the States 2007 (PDF), a publication of the Council for Affordable Health Insurance.

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Institute of the North

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Monday, April 28, 2008

Legislative Non-Action is Half a Loaf

A View from Alaska

By John LaPlante

Categories: Alaska

In an editorial the Anchorage Daily News, the leading newspaper of Alaska, chides Gov. Sarah Palin for not pushing government-run health care.

"She can't rely on platitudes such as fixing the system by having individuals take more responsibility for their own health care," the paper says. Granted, there's more to improving health than simply saying "get your own health care." Government needs to undo some of the damage that it has already done through, oh, certificate of need laws (which the ADN editorial board supports) and giving tax equity so that people who buy health insurance outside of either corporate or government bureaucracies are not disadvantaged.

It also criticizes her for not supporting "a modest expansion of the state health insurance program for children of working families." (See all our discussion on SCHIP to understand why this is a bad idea.)

Now if Gov. Palin could indeed provide some specific leadership on the question --and perhaps she has, I'm not familiar with her record--she would be my kind of governor!