Montana

Health Policy rankings

Health indicators	Rank
Population	916,265
Number of insurance mandates	39
Death rate per 100,000	778.8
Percent of adults overweight or obese	54.70%
Percent of adults who have visited a dentist in the last 12 months	65.90%
Number of births (2004)	11,519

Ranking public policy	Rank
Overall health ownership rank	6
Government health care rank	10
Private health insurance rank	21
Medical tort rank	35
Provider burden of regulation rank	3

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.

Government offices

Monday, April 28, 2008

Trapping Kids in Government Programs

By John LaPlante

Categories: Montana, SCHIP

According to the Bozeman Daily Chronicle, more children in Montana may soon be herded into a government program.

"State Auditor and Insurance Commissioner John Morrison," the paper says, "is leading efforts to make more Montana kids eligible for a federal heath-insurance program."

Morrison isn't just getting is employees to step-up efforts to enroll children who are currently eligible but not participating. He's also leading the effort to expand the Montana Medicaid program through a ballot measure, Initiative 155. (The Montana Standard has more.)

Anyone see a conflict of interest here?

posted by John LaPlante
11:50 am
0 comment

Monday, January 14, 2008

Montana Looking at SCHIP Expansion

Voters to decide on SCHIP & Medicaid ballot measure

By Marc Kilmer

Categories: Medicaid, Montana, SCHIP

Montana's state auditor is pushing a ballot initiative to expand the state's children's health insurance program to cover children in families up to 250% of the federal poverty level (FPL) and increase Medicaid eligibility up to 185% of FPL. The proposal would have originally mandated that all children in the state have health insurance, but it was rewritten to remove this mandate.

An interesting addition to the measure is a proposal that would allow the state to pay for private health insurance for children who are eligible for Medicaid or SCHIP but whose parents have private health coverage. If the premium increase for adding the child is less than the cost of covering the child with government insurance, the state would pay for the private coverage. That sounds like a better way of covering people than merely expanding government programs, but I wonder how much crowd-out will occur.