10 Worst States for Healthcare
The states that ranked the lowest in seven different health factors.
We’ve already brought you a list of the best states for healthcare, now it’s time to bring you the worst.To help definitively answer the question of what the best states and worst states for healthcare are, 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 Richard Barrington, senior financial analyst, MoneyRates.com, says, “For health executives and policymakers, these rankings can be viewed as a report card of areas that perform well and areas that need improvement. 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.”Here are those states that ranks at the bottom:
9. (tie) Nevada
“Though it earned a rating of healthy for both infant survival and nursing home capacity, its overall ranking was pulled down by critical ratings in the categories of insurance coverage, hospital capacity, and patient care doctors per capita,” Barrington says.
9. (tie) Tennessee
The one critical rating for Tennessee came from being one of the worst states for longevity. It earned a healthy rating for nursing home capacity, but that wasn't enough to overcome its weaker categories.
8. Alaska
This is one of the worst states for health insurance coverage, earning it a critical rating for that category. Everything else was rated average or frail.
7. Oklahoma
“Oddly enough, Oklahoma is one of the five top states for both nursing home and hospital capacity relative to demand. Unfortunately, ranking in the bottom 10 for the five other categories was enough to drag it down into the bottom 10 overall,” Barrington says.
6. South Dakota
“The biggest problem here was ranking last for available nursing home capacity; low hospital capacity also earned the state a critical rating,” Barrington says.
5. West Virginia
“There are a couple pieces of good news for healthcare in West Virginia, as the state was rated healthy for insurance coverage and available hospital capacity,” Barrington says. “However, that wasn't enough to overcome two critical and two frail ratings.”
4. Alabama
Like Georgia, Alabama earned a robust rating for child vaccinations, but fell down in most of the other categories.
3. Georgia
Though it earned a robust rating for child vaccinations, three critical and two frail ratings in other categories were enough to pull Georgia down.
2. South Carolina
The best grade for South Carolina was “average” for available hospital capacity; ratings in all other six categories were either frail or critical.
1. Mississippi
Ranking worst overall should be no surprise, considering Mississippi was dead last in three out of seven categories: longevity, infant survival and patient care doctors per capita.