Happiness is a Warm Gun, Momma: Two New State Rankings

As the (vain) author of the only index ranking state's health-care policies, I'm thrilled to see new scholars enter the field of measuring states according to metrics that intersect or are adjacent to the Index of Health Ownership. Two new indexes have just been published.

Gallup, the well-known polling organization, teamed up with America's Health Insurance Plans (AHIP) a year ago to produce an Index of Well-Being, which just released its first comprehensive edition. It comes from polling data and purports to measure which states are "happiest", according to the media. The survey asks a broad series of questions about "well-being" including possession of health insurance and access to medical care (which are not the same thing, at all).

Second, scholars at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University have released Freedom in the 50 States: An Index of Personal and Economic Freedom. Freedom is a very libertarian index, including assessments of laws restricting the right to bear arms. (Hence, the title of this post.) It also intersects very closely with the Index of Health Ownership in three areas: health-insurance regulation, occupational licensing, and tort liability. The authors use CAHI's Health Insurance Mandates in the States (as do I) to measure the impact of states' mandated benefits and other regulations. However, they report extremely high costs of these mandates, which lead me to believe that they have not differentiated between total costs and marginal costs of mandated benefits - the very challenging issue that I addressed in a study published last year.

The next edition of Index of Health Ownership is scheduled for this summer. I intend to add a section discussing other rankings of states, and how they relate to IHOP.