Map of the Day: Access to Good Primary Care in America

Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.


I’m playing around with GeoFRED again while we all wait for the next three or four shoes to drop on the Jeff Sessions show. Here’s an interesting map: the rate of preventable hospital admissions. This is based on the number of hospital admissions for “ambulatory care sensitive conditions,” such as diabetes, asthma, and hypertension, which normally doesn’t require hospitalization if patients are being treated by good primary care doctors. Essentially, then, this map shows the places where good primary care isn’t widely available or isn’t doing its job.

What makes it interesting is that it doesn’t map all that closely to poverty. From Kentucky down to Louisiana, you have lots of counties with high poverty and a poor access to good primary care. But north of that you have the same thing even though poverty is relatively low. Out west, you have the opposite: a fair amount of poverty, but pretty good access to primary care. So what’s going on?

Fact:

Mother Jones was founded as a nonprofit in 1976 because we knew corporations and billionaires wouldn't fund the type of hard-hitting journalism we set out to do.

Today, reader support makes up about two-thirds of our budget, allows us to dig deep on stories that matter, and lets us keep our reporting free for everyone. If you value what you get from Mother Jones, please join us with a tax-deductible donation today so we can keep on doing the type of journalism 2022 demands.

payment methods

Fact:

Today, reader support makes up about two-thirds of our budget, allows us to dig deep on stories that matter, and lets us keep our reporting free for everyone. If you value what you get from Mother Jones, please join us with a tax-deductible donation today so we can keep on doing the type of journalism 2022 demands.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate