10 Best States for Healthcare

Good healthcare is hard to exactly define. What measurements are or aren’t important? What defines a healthy population?To help answer those questions, as well as to gain a better picture of where healthcare measurements are lacking, MoneyRates.com created a proprietary study of the best and worst states for healthcare. It ranked all 50 states plus the District of Columbia based on seven different factors: health insurance coverage, age-adjusted mortality, vaccination rates, infant mortality, nursing-home availability, hospital availability and practicing physicians per capita. Ranks across the seven categories were averaged, and those averages were used to rank the states overall.As for overall landscape of what healthcare looks like in the U.S., it can vary widely by location, according to Richard Barrington, senior financial analyst, MoneyRates.com“It depends on where you look, because the differences in conditions are jarring. For example, more than 40% of the kids in Oregon are unvaccinated, which is worse than twice the national average,” Barrington says. “More than 17% of people in Texas lack health insurance, which is more than six times the percentage uninsured in Massachusetts. Our study found contrasts like that across a range of different criteria.”Related article: Top 10 States with the Highest Drug Use ProblemsUnderstanding those differences highlights challenges-and opportunities-for healthcare executives.“For health executives and policymakers, these rankings can be viewed as a report card of areas that perform well and areas that need improvement,” says Barrington. “From a business standpoint, health executives can also look at areas needing improvement as an opportunity. For example, even Massachusetts, which ranked as the best state overall, was among the worst for available hospital capacity. That could be an opportunity for someone to provide that capacity. This study could interest health executives from the standpoint of showing where supply is not meeting demand in their home states and where opportunities might exist to provide what they do well in other states.”Below is a summary of where the top 10 best and worst states ranked and why. For more specifics on the strengths and weaknesses of particular states, please see the comparison tool within this article.