Foundation award to KU will fund study of rural health care, local tax burden

LAWRENCE - A study by a University of Kansas sociologist is expected to reveal whether rural residents will accept a heavier tax burden at the local level to pay for health care services.

Professor Mary K. Zimmerman, who also has a faculty appointment in health policy on the KU Medical Center campus in Kansas City, has received a $100,000 grant from The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation to study county-level funding for healthcare services in nine states.

The study follows on Zimmerman's mid-1990s investigation of county-level public spending for health-care services in Kansas. Kansas counties spent between 12.1 percent and 13.6 percent of their budgets to fund local health care between 1994 and '96.

That study found some counties were moving funds from traditional concerns like roads and safety to sustain their healthcare systems.

"We wondered if Kansas was unique," Zimmerman said.

In this grant, she and colleagues will take another look at Kansas, as well as Georgia, Iowa, Kentucky, Nebraska, New Mexico, Montana, South Dakota and West Virginia. They will look at publicly available county budgets for the year 1997, 1999 and 2001, she said.

Zimmerman said her group would examine the extent to which county tax expenditures are used to fund local health care services, the factors that determine funding decisions and the categories of services.

"If we confirm our findings from the Kansas study," Zimmerman said, "it is a signal that people are willing to support health care services with public funding."

Zimmerman said the study results would add significantly to less-detailed U.S. census data that report only broad categories of local healthcare spending.

The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, based in Princeton, N.J., is the nation's largest philanthropy devoted exclusively to health and healthcare.