The WP has this story today on the American College of Emergency Physicians on their new National Report Card on the State of Emergency Medicine.

Now I haven't really posted maps yet on healthcare, but guess what? The same pattern applies. Let's take a look on the bottom 16 states for Emergency health services.



Notice anything? Guess which states were the top three? Why California, Massachusetts and Connecticut. Only two Red states made it into the top ten, Ohio and South Carolina. Only 4 Blue states were in the bottom 25, Washington, Wisconsin, Oregon and Hawaii. No blue states are in the bottom 10.

Also in this report are grades referring to "Medical Liability Environment." This is why I don't give money to any medical professional organizations, their foolish belief that tort reform will improve medicine, and not the bottom line of companies like Enron and Walmart. To their credit they show the data on medical liability as it relates to the quality of emergency service.



A higher score means the states have laws capping medical liability claims and pain and suffering pay outs. Notice that there is no correlation between quality of emergency service and medical liability laws? For instance MA and CT were in the top three for overall grade (DC was actually number one but since it is not a state I do not count it) but these states have an "D-" or "F" for medical liability. Some of the bottom states, like Nevada have a high score. Only one state, California, receives an "A" for medical liability laws and still receives an overall grade higher than a "C" wherease many of the states receiving an "F" for liability have scores of B or more. Hmm, seems that liability isn't preventing good medicine from being provided or responsible for making good medicine happen. I'll try to find the raw data and tinker in Sigmaplot and see if I can get a more informative graph from the data.

So, don't get injured in the red states, save those injuries for California or Massachusetts.