There are 920,000 hospital beds in America. Most people don’t have to use them. However, 145 million Americans go to emergency rooms each year, which is where a large percentage of U.S. residents get their only medical treatment. The quality of the care they receive varies widely from hospital to hospital, city to city, and state to state – and the worst state for healthcare is Delaware.

The COVID-19 pandemic changed American healthcare radically. Large numbers of doctors retired or were driven out of business because they could not see patients due to concern about infection. Hospitals had no room for people with serious diseases like heart problems and cancer because beds were occupied by COVID-19 patients. Some nurses left their profession. Others came out of retirement because of the overwhelming need for healthcare staff due to the spread of the virus. (These are the 16 states where hospitals are experiencing the worst workforce shortages.)

The financial situations of many patients and their families changed as well. Treatment for COVID-19 that involved hospitalization could cost tens of thousands of dollars. Some people’s finances buckled under that strain.

Healthcare Transformers, a content hub for executive leaders in healthcare, recently released a study titled “Healthcare Hotspots in the USA”. The study ranked states according to the number of hospitals in each one, residents per hospital, staff per hospital bed, discharges, and patient days as well as gross patient revenue, patient satisfaction survey results, dentists per 100,000 people, infant and maternal mortality rates, life expectancy at birth, and annual healthcare spending per capita. (This is how much your state spends on your health.)

A perfect score from the study would have been 100 points. No state came close, and Delaware held the bottom place with a score of 31.4, followed by Georgia at 32.5 and Arkansas at 33.8.

Click here to see the worst American states for healthcare

The state with the best score was New York at 58.9. The other top three states are all in the Northeast. Connecticut, in second place, received a score of 58.3, followed by Pennsylvania at 57.4 and Massachusetts at 56.1. Interestingly, states with low populations also did well. North Dakota ranked sixth with a score of 55, followed by South Dakota with a score of 54.9.