The Best & Worst Places to Get Sick

Editors note: This story is part of a new partnership between TheStreet and the personal finance site Bundle.

BOSTON (TheStreet) -- When medical needs arise, are some states better places to be? Are there places where you are out of luck and resigned to less than top-shelf treatment?

It was with these questions in mind that TheStreet and Bundle set out to look at how health care services compare state by state. While other assessments and "top 10 lists" zero in on more granular metrics, our survey focused on top-of-mind items for consumers.

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Having your ailment treated quickly and effectively is certainly the primary objective. To that end, you want access to health care and adequate space at hospitals to accommodate you. You want to be able to see a doctor, have specialists available and be assured staffing levels ensure attentive care. Once you feel better and the bills start to arrive, you want to feel you are paying a fair price.

Among the criteria we used was the number of hospital beds per 1,000 people, the degree to which medical care was cost prohibitive, medical staffing levels (encompassing doctors, nurses and physician assistants), the average daily cost of in-patient care and the average per capita spending on health care services annually. The data was culled from Bundle.com's proprietary data on spending, government reports and information aggregated by the Kaiser Family Health Foundation.

The data proved surprising, or even counterintuitive, when smaller, more rural and less populated states ranked as well, or better, than larger states with the brand and cache of world-renowned institutions.

North Dakota and South Dakota -- compared with other states as well as national averages -- topped our list, followed by Pennsylvania, Nebraska and Iowa.

By comparison, Massachusetts and New York, considered global centers of medical innovation, ranked 13th and 19th respectively. Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, California and Nevada anchored the bottom of the list, performing below par in numerous categories.

Dr. Kevin Kavanagh -- founder of Health Watch USA, a Kentucky-based advocacy group, and the new website www.neverevents.org, focused on medical errors and hospital-acquired infections -- says rural areas and less-populated states aren't necessarily at a disadvantage.

"It depends upon the condition that you have and the overall philosophy of the institution," he says. "Some of the smaller hospitals, if you go in for an appendectomy or hernia repair, for example, do them very commonly and very well. They have very excellent staffing and you may have less of a chance of getting a complication or infection there than going to a large center."