Study Finds Health Care Varies by StateBy Andrea Stone, Senior Washington Correspondent, AOL News
posted: 14 HOURS 51 MINUTES AGOcomments: 1024filed under: Health News, National NewsPRINT|E-MAILMOREText SizeAAAWASHINGTON (Oct. 
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Vermont and Hawaii are better places to get sick than Mississippi or Texas. The best coordinated, patient-centered medical care is found in Maine but not in Nevada. If you want to live long, head to Minnesota but bypass Tennessee.
Those are among the findings of a new study by the Commonwealth Fund, an independent health policy research group that ranked health care in the 50 states and the District of Columbia. Using 38 performance indicators, the scorecard comes as lawmakers debate a health care bill in Congress, and it provides fodder for supporters and opponents with C-SPAN-ready visuals for constituents watching at home.
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The report, titled “Aiming Higher,” lays out in stark detail how states rank on access to health care, quality of care, avoidable hospital use and costs, equity across income and racial lines and whether residents enjoyed long and healthy lives.
An initial accounting by Commonwealth in 2007 found wide disparities in the health care system. This second scorecard shows gaps remain and in some cases have grown wider. For instance, health insurance coverage for adults has declined in most states since 2007. At the same time, most states saw gains in health coverage for children thanks to federal and state support for the Children’s Health Insurance Program.
Yet geographic variations remained stark, often with as much as a two- to three-fold spread from top to bottom states. States in New England and the Upper Midwest continued to provide the nation’s best health care. Iowa, Minnesota, Nebraska and the Dakotas did it while lowering costs, a sign the states focused on coordinated care and more efficient use of resources, the study said.
States in the South, the Southwest and the Lower Midwest, however, lagged far behind. On one measure, infant mortality, dismal statistics in the District of Columbia, Mississippi and Louisiana helped drag the U.S. as a whole down to 19th among European and other Western nations.
“In the richest country in the world, there is no justification for any state to be far below any other state,” said Karen Davis, president of the Commonwealth Fund, who said the survey revealed “shockingly wide variations across states.”
Among the findings:
– In Texas, 32 percent of working-age adults were uninsured compared to just 7 percent in Massachusetts, the first state to offer a universal health insurance program.
– Only one in three adult diabetics in Mississippi get preventive care. In Minnesota, 67 percent do.
– Rates for hospital re-admissions, a symptom of poor health care coordination, for seniors on Medicare ranged from a high of 23 percent in Nevada to a low of 13 percent in Oregon.
“Where you live in the U.S. matters in terms of your health care,” said study co-author Cathy Schoen, “and it shouldn’t.”
At a time when most people like their doctors and are satisfied with their health insurance, the report offers “a reason to move beyond assumptions that everything is going to be okay to asking tough questions as to why the health care system isn’t delivering the results that it could,” said Alan Weil, executive director of the National Academy of State Health.
The study doesn’t mention that many states with the worst quality and cost of health care are represented in Congress by some of the fiercest opponents of Democratic proposals for change. For instance, Republican John Cornyn of Texas has criticized the Senate Finance Committee’s draft bill and said he’ll vote against it. His state ranks 46th overall and last in access and equity of care.
Cornyn spokesman Kevin McLaughlin noted that the Commonwealth Fund “openly supports and has aggressively advocated for a government plan” and added that, “No one supports real meaningful health care reform more than Sen. Cornyn, but Democratic plans to dump another trillion dollars into a broken system isn’t the kind of reform Texas needs.”
Stuart Butler, vice president of domestic policy at the conservative Heritage Foundation, said, “It’s not really a big surprise you would see push-back in the states where you have bigger problems.” States with relatively good care and insurance coverage are likely to see less disruption in their health care systems but those in lagging jurisdictions “are very nervous about sweeping changes in health care.”
Still, said Commonwealth’s Davis, the scorecard shows that “states cannot go it alone. Health reform is needed on a national level.”
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