Published on December 21, 2012 at 5:12 AM
CQ HealthBeat: Report Finds Budget Cuts Put Preparedness at Risk
The nation has made progress in preparing for disasters in the past decade but those accomplishments "are now being undermined due to severe budget cuts and lack of prioritization," according to a report released Wednesday by the Trust for America's Health and Robert Wood Johnson Foundation…The 80-page report included a state-by-state analysis of the country's readiness, which determined that Kansas and Montana were the least prepared based on 10 measures. The report found that 29 states reduced public health spending from fiscal 2011 to fiscal 2012, and 23 of them did so for the second consecutive year. State and local health departments have cut more than 45,700 jobs nationwide since 2008, the report said (Adams, 12/19).
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 This article was reprinted from kaiserhealthnews.org with permission from the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation. Kaiser Health News, an editorially independent news service, is a program of the Kaiser Family Foundation, a nonpartisan health care policy research organization unaffiliated with Kaiser Permanente.
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