Florida ranks among worst states for women's healthcare, new study says

ORLANDO, Fla. — Florida ranks the worst in the country for prenatal care, as many women miss medical visits in their first three months of pregnancy, according to a new report on women’s healthcare released this week.

About 32% of Florida women said they did not start prenatal care during their first trimester, while the national average was 23%, the report found. In Vermont, the top-ranked state, only 13% of women missed out on prenatal care during the early months of their pregnancies.

“Where you lives matters to your health and healthcare,” said Joseph Betancourt, president of The Commonwealth Fund, which produced the report. “While some states undoubtedly are championing women’s continued access to vital health and reproductive services, many others are failing to ensure that women can get and afford the healthcare they need.”

The Commonwealth Fund, a healthcare advocacy foundation, found that in the 10 states where Medicaid has not been expanded — including Florida — women struggle to pay for medical visits and often skip appointments because of cost.

In Florida, Medicaid, a state and federally funded program that provides healthcare coverage for low-income people, pays for up to 10 prenatal care visits.

Florida’s lack of Medicaid expansion has left about 388,000 adults in a so-called coverage gap, meaning they would qualify if the program was expanded, according to medical non-profit the Kaiser Family Foundation.

Women in Florida were about 28% less likely to have health insurance than the national average, ranking 47th in that category. More than a fifth said they have skipped out on a doctor’s appointment in the past year because they couldn’t afford it, the report found.

The state ranked 51st out of the the 50 states and Washington, D.C. on percentage of women that missed early prenatal care.

The top three states with lowest death rate for mothers — Vermont, California and Connecticut — have all expanded Medicaid. Those states also reported more women who accessed care soon after they learned they were pregnant, the report noted.

The report was a scorecard that ranked the 50 states and D.C. on various aspects of women’s health and reproductive care. It was the fund’s first scorecard on women’s healthcare. It was prompted by social and political events, including the 2022 overturning of Roe v. Wade, which limited abortion access across the country.

Those same events put women’s healthcare nationwide “under threat,” the report’s authors concluded.

“Women’s health in the U.S. is in a very fragile state,” Betancourt said.

Because data for the report was gathered during the past three years, it doesn’t entirely show the effects of the overturning of Roe v. Wade or more recent policies. Those policies didn’t have time to take effect before the data was collected.

Florida ranked 39th in the country for women’s healthcare overall, which includes metrics such as access to abortion clinics, insurance affordability and maternal mortality rates, among others, the report found.

Across the country, women are dying of preventable causes like breast and cervical cancer, it said. Florida’s death rate from those cancers is slightly higher than the national average.

States across the South tended to rank lower overall than those in the northeastern part of the country.

Florida did better than the national average on the percentage of women who have had HIV screenings and reported a lower-than-average rate of women who reported mental health concerns.

Florida’s proportion of abortion clinics per woman was about the same as the national average, as of data from 2023. That was before this May, when Florida banned most abortions past six weeks.

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