By Sean Miskell, Georgetown University Center for Children and Families

Comparing outcomes across states provides an opportunity to consider how state-specific approaches to administering their health programs provide coverage to their residents and help them stay enrolled. Our readers certainly know that we like our 50-state tables here at Georgetown. The Commonwealth Fund has updated its interactive tool that allows users to see the gains states could realize by achieving the levels of better-performing states across a variety of metrics.

In addition to highlighting divergent outcomes across states, this useful tool helps us to visualize the number of people that would benefit from state-level improvements in coverage and enrollment. For example, in a post highlighting the updated interactive tool, researchers at the Commonwealth Fund considered how many more adults in states that have not yet expanded Medicaid would gain coverage if their state had insurance levels comparable to those in Kentucky, whose Medicaid expansion and successful state-based marketplace (ahem) helped the state achieve the greatest improvement in coverage for adults from 2013 to 2014. Should this come to pass, this analysis based on Commonwealth’s interactive tool demonstrates that 6.2 million more adults in these states would be insured.

Editor’s Note: This post is a lightly edited excerpt of one published on the Center for Children and Families Say Ahhh! Blog. Read the full post here.