Response to Questions: Potential Effects on Alaska of Proposed Health-Care Reform Legislation

Mark Foster and Rosyland Frazier of UAA's Institute for Social and Economic Research (ISER) have recently been looking at the problems Alaska's Medicare patients face in getting primary-care doctors to see them. Both the authors have broad experience studying health-care issues in Alaska, and they prepared a note to respond quickly to questions from and discussions with the Office of the Governor in Washington, D.C. and Alaska's Congressional delegation. Those questions and discussions were about the possible implications for Alaska's Medicare patients of provisions in health-care reform legislation the U.S. Congress is considering, as well as about the broader potential effects on Alaska of the proposed legislation. This is by no means a full analysis of the many complex issues associated with health-care reform. A working paper by the same authors -- examining the Medicare-access problem and related health-policy issues in more detail -- will be available soon.

"Alaska's health-care system and economy could be affected by several provisions of health-care reform legislation Congress is now considering. In response to questions from and discussion with policymakers, we did a preliminary analysis of some of the potential effects.
We want to emphasize that we support health-care reform: We believe changes are vital, and that the millions of uninsured Americans need affordable access to health care. But as we'll discuss, different circumstances in Alaska mean that the effects of proposed changes could be different here than in many other states..."

You can download a PDF of the complete note here.

The findings and conclusions of this note are those of the authors. If you have questions, get in touch will Rosyland Frazier at anrrf@uaa.alaska.edu.