Health care research: providing Montanans with data.

• Author: Barkey, Pat

The nice thing about being a researcher is that your job is never done. In the case of health care policy research, you might be tempted to say that it has yet to be started. That's not a knock on the research community--those many excellent economists, statisticians, public health researchers, and other policy wonks who have devoted much time to designing and evaluating how we provide and pay for health care. It simply reflects the reality of health care, a topic so vast and changing so rapidly that the policy questions seem to multiply faster than we can answer them.

Yet the questions are important, particularly in a state with distinctly different challenges--and resources--like Montana. Arriving in this great state from the more industrial, more urbanized Midwest, I've become aware of the differences, and the similarities, of those challenges and opportunities for change and improvement in health care.

No matter where you live, health care isn't just another item on the shopping list. It's personal--it's about us and our families. We don't consider it a luxury, yet we often pay what seems like a very luxurious price for it. It's that way all over the country, and everyone, it seems, has his or her favorite solution to the problem, from price controls to mandated insurance to re-importation of drugs.

Understanding which--if any--of those solutions can help and which might make problems worse is what data gathering and careful research should be helping us sort out. The fact that many of the policy decisions involved are made in Washington, D.C., and not here doesn't make the issues any less relevant for Montana.

But it's easy to see what makes health care distinctly different in Montana: the vast distances that separate many of us from even general care, let alone the specialized services routinely found in more urban areas. Yet I am impressed with how Montanans have adapted to the practical and logistical challenges presented by the state's sheer size--in health care and just about everything else. I am also impressed with how well the state has adapted to the absence of a major medical school within our borders and continues to attract top talent.

I hope to continue the excellent work of Steve Seninger in the Bureau and, together with the BBER staff, continue to serve as the scorekeeper for the segment of the economy that...