By: Health Insurance
Submitted: 2009-12-26 13:46:23 | Word Count: 507
Texas is one of the best-prepared states in the U.S. for responding to a public health emergency, a report released Tuesday concluded.
Texas scores high in emergency preparedness during a time when many other states are suffering cuts in state and federal public health funding and losses in medical staff, according to the Ready or Not? report, sponsored by Trust for America's Health, a disease prevention advocacy group, and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.
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However, the recession has fueled a dangerous nationwide backslide in overall emergency preparedness, people involved in the report said. The H1N1 pandemic exposed shortcomings in every state, including Texas.
Problem areas
“The country as a whole is significantly unprepared for many large disasters in many areas,” said Irwin Redlener, director of the National Center for Disaster Preparedness at Columbia University's Mailman School of Public Health. “Regardless of scores, we're sliding in the wrong direction with respect to how prepared we are for large-scale incidents.”
The Ready or Not? report evaluates states based on 10 criteria, ranging from state public health funding to whether they have the capacity to respond to an infectious disease outbreak. Texas was one of eight states to reach the top score of nine out of a possible 10 points.
The only criteria Texas did not meet was for Medical Reserve Corps readiness — a measure of the state's volunteer emergency response system. The report did not indicate why Texas failed to achieve the standard.
While more than half of the states cut their public health funding, and federal preparedness funds have been cut by 27 percent since fiscal year 2005, Texas increased its public health funding by 3.1 percent in the last fiscal year, according to the report.
Lack of insurance
However, Texas “should not be content” with its public health system as it stands, Redlener said.
“Texas has significant problems that really belie the rating it just got,” he said, citing Texas' ranking as the state with the highest level of those lacking health insurance.
“A lot of people are marginalized” from the health insurance system completely, she said. “Texas in many ways has enormous problems which really confound the ability of Texas to be prepared (for a health emergency).”
Because the study evaluates states on a “yes” or “no” checklist basis, there is no way to determine the quality of a given preparedness indicator for each state, making the high score of Texas only a piece of the larger picture, Redlener added.
“This H1N1 flu outbreak has exposed some pretty serious gaps in the nation's ability to respond to a public health emergency,” said Richard Hamburg, deputy director of Trust for America's Health.
