Under Tight Budgets, Public Health Spending Falls For First Time

Policymakers took heart from another year of relatively slow health-spending growth in 2011, documented by government statisticians and disclosed in a report Monday. But one aspect of moderating health expenditures — and the only category showing outright decline — could cost more than it saves. Hit by recession and tight budgets, spending on public health by federal, state and local governments fell in 2011 for the first time since analysts started tracking the numbers in 1960.

“Public health is adaptable, but the resource reductions now have been so substantial that it truly does put the public’s health at risk,” said Dr. Georges C. Benjamin, executive director of the American Public Health Association, an organization of public health pros. “I’m usually a little reluctant to say that, but we’re at that point.” Research links higher public health spending with reduced rates of infant mortality, preventable deaths in adults and other measures of community health.

“We’ve got strong evidence there is a connection between resources invested in public health and health outcomes,” said Glen P. Mays, a professor at the University of Kentucky whose 2011 Health Affairs article associated a 10 percent increase in local public health spending over more than a decade with reductions in death rates of between 1 percent and 7 percent. “That suggests that cutbacks in funding, certainly over time, could have some adverse health consequences.”...