Hawaii Top of The List For Affordable Health Insurance

Sandy beaches and tropical breezes may not be the only reason Hawaii is a paradise. Everyone talks about the “Massachusetts Experiment”, but many fail to realize that it was actually Hawaii that was one of the first states to make it mandatory that employers provide affordable health insurance to their employees.

And a recent survey found that Hawaii ranked number one in the nation overall in providing all of its citizen’s access to affordable medical insurance. The study called The National Scorecard on US Health System Performance was designed to evaluate the healthcare system nationwide on several parameters. The report looked at 32 different factors when evaluating healthcare in a given state, including access, quality, hospital use and costs, healthcare equity, lifespan and disease states. Hawaii led the list in healthy individuals, in access to affordable healthcare and low cost medical insurance. Mississippi was at the bottom.

The report concluded that if all the states could follow Hawaii example and achieve the same scores, some 90,000 deaths could be prevented nationwide annually, more than half of the currently 47 million Americans without affordable medical insurance would find themselves with government supplied or other low cost heath insurance, and some 22 billion dollars in healthcare costs could be saved.

Interestingly enough the Scorecard also found that higher costs did not necessarily correlate with higher quality care. Many of the states like Hawaii that scored at the top of the list had high numbers in both access to affordable medical coverage and low cost healthcare as well as high marks for quality of care. The other States at the top of the ranking were, Iowa, New Hampshire, Vermont, Maine, Rhode Island, Connecticut, Massachusetts, Wisconsin, South Dakota, Minnesota, Nebraska, and North Dakota.

The states that scored the poorest as far as access to low cost medical insurance and affordable healthcare overall and made up the bottom of the list were; California, Tennessee, Alabama, Georgia, Florida, West Virginia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Nevada, Arkansas, Texas, Mississippi, and Oklahoma.