Best & Worst States for Health Care: An Update

As the COVID-19 pandemic continues, it is clear that it has put a strain on the US health care system. Americans need access to quality, affordable health care and state health care systems are faced with vaccine administration and caring for persons infected with COVID-19, including new variants, and other conditions. Health care can be expensive in the US, but higher medical costs do not always translate to better outcomes. A 2021 analysis by the Kaiser Family Foundation found that the US is lagging behind several other wealthy countries on many measures such as health coverage, life expectancy, and disease burden.

The quality of health care systems can vary by state, so to determine where Americans receive the best and worst health care, WalletHub compared the 50 states and the District of Columbia across 3 dimensions: cost, access, and outcomes. Each dimension was evaluated using several relevant metrics, which ranged from percentage of insured adults to hospital beds per capita to cardiovascular disease rate. In the slides below, find which states ranked highest and lowest across each metric.