Massachusetts Ranked Eighth-Worst State for Doctors

 
Massachusetts is home to two of the top-10 best hospitals in the country—Massachusetts General Hospital in first, and Brigham and Women’s Hospital in sixth—and Harvard, the best research medical school in the nation. It may come as a surprise, then, that we were ranked the eighth-worst state in America for doctors.

How is that possible, when Commonwealth doctors are surrounded by some of the nation’s best places to learn and work?

Many of the 11 metrics used in the rankings, done by WalletHub, focus on economic conditions for doctors, like starting salary and malpractice insurance expenses. Massachusetts was near the bottom of the list in categories like malpractice award payouts and cost of living-adjusted annual and starting salary. In addition, only nine states were projected to have more physicians than Massachusetts by 2022. That means more competition—which may be good for patients, but can be challenging for docs.

We only broke the top five in one category: least punitive medical boards.

Mississippi was ranked the best state for doctors, followed by Iowa, Minnesota, North Dakota, and Idaho. The highest-ranked New England state was New Hampshire, at 39th.

It’s worth noting that some of the factors that contributed to our 44th-place finish apply to everybody, not just doctors. Indeed, physicians certainly aren’t the only ones feeling the squeeze from our high costs of living—far from it.