Study Says Tennessee Has 11th Worst Health Care in America

When it comes to health care in America, where you live can make all the difference. Access to quality medical facilities, the affordability of health care, and patient outcomes should all be taken into consideration.

Health care has two crucial components, cost and quality. The best health care in the nation isn’t helpful if it bankrupts the people who try to get it, and cheap health care isn’t worth paying for if it provides subpar or ineffective treatment. ~WalletHub Analyst

To determine where Americans receive the best and worst health care, WalletHub ranked the 50 states and the District of Columbia according to their scores in the following three main categories and dozens of subcategories.

• Cost: To determine this score, the study looked at the cost of medical and dental visits, average hospital expenses, average monthly insurance premiums, and out-of-pocket costs. This category also includes the share of adults who don’t see a doctor because of the cost.
• Access: A state’s accessibility score was calculated by examining more than 20 factors, including average EMS response time, average ER wait time, health care professionals (physicians, nurses, EMTs, dentists) per capita, share of insured and uninsured individuals, and dozens more.
• Outcomes: This category measured some of the tougher, but no less important subject matter. As you can imagine, “outcomes” refers to metrics like infant, child, and maternal mortality rates. The study also calculated life expectancy, cancer, stroke, and heart disease rates.

Study Says Tennessee Has Some of America’s Worst Health Care

According to this study, Tennessee has the 40th best health care in the country. Another less flattering way to look at it is that Tennessee has the 11th worst health care in the country. Any way you look at it, it’s not great for the Volunteer state. Here’s a look at how Tennessee ranks in each category of the study

• 14th when it comes to the cost of health care (yay)
• 40th in accessibility (yikes)
• 45th in outcomes (big yikes)

READ MORE: These Two Tennessee Cities Are Among the Ten Most Dangerous in America

If you take a few minutes to look over the FULL REPORT, you will notice an interesting trend – most of America’s worst health care can be found in the South. Alabama and its neighbor Mississippi are bringing up the rear at #50 and #51. You can scroll over the map below to see the results for the rest of the country.