Monday, 23 July 2007
Healthcare Quality Varies Among U.S. States
The Commonwealth Fund, a private research foundation measuring healthcare, conducted a study to examine each U.S. state’s healthcare system. The study found there were considerable variations among states.
Each state’s system was ranked on a scorecard based on many factors such as access and quality of care, life span and death rates, and healthcare spending.
States with the best overall healthcare systems included Hawaii, Iowa, New Hampshire, Vermont, and Maine. They were rated well for low number of uninsured residents and high-quality of care.
The poorest performing states were Nevada, Arkansas, Texas, Mississippi and Oklahoma, partly because of high uninsured rates. In some states, up to 30% of working adults had no health insurance.
“The leading states outperformed the lagging states in multiple areas and dimensions in overall rankings,” said senior vice president of The Commonwealth Fund, Cathy Schoen. “The bottom 10 tend to rank low on multiple indicators and areas of the scorecard, indicating systemic differences in policies and practices underlie these variations.”
The study found that the Midwest and Northeastern states had the best healthcare systems in the U.S. The worst systems were in the South. It also found that higher spending on healthcare did not necessarily mean higher-quality care.
“This Commonwealth Fund report confirms that more spending does not result in better care,” said John R. Graham from the San Francisco-based Pacific Research Institute. “We can learn a lot from these measurements.”
“It’s really an important and somewhat jarring reminder of the disparities between states, as well as between regions,” said Cathy Dunham, who is president of Access Project in Boston, Massachusetts.
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