New Mexico Health Care Ownership
The Pacific Research Institute recently released a new study that discusses the importance of owning one’s own health care and then ranks all 50 states on various matrices dealing with health care ownership.
Ownership is important because absent individual ownership, politicians interfere with our freedom to use our own money to make our own choices about the health care we need. Government mandates increase costs and, more important, lower the quality of care. The choice about health care should be in the hands of the patient and his doctor.
Surprisingly enough, especially given our high rate of uninsured and the prevalance of government health care in the state, New Mexico actually fares pretty well in the study with an overall ranking of 22nd.
Categories included: government health care in which Newe Mexico came in at 48th because it seriously underinvests in prescription drugs, is much too dependent on federal matching payments, and has overexpanded Medicaid eligibility; private health insurance (NM is 16th); medical tort (NM is 45th due to an unpredictable and often unfair system); and lastly, New Mexico is actually best in the nation in burden of regulation (the authors state that this is because of few restrictions on nurse practitioners’ scope of practice and the corporate practice of medicine).
New Mexico can do better by reforming Medicaid, but adopting “universal” coverage as Massachusetts (ranked 45th) has done will not help matters.