A new report finds Arkansas’ health system performance is the worst in the nation for Hispanic residents. That’s the conclusion of The Commonwealth Fund 2026 State Health Disparities Report, released April 29, 2026.
The research examines racial disparities across the country, state by state. Health Equity Research Director Jess Maksut, PhD, says health care disparities exist in every part of the nation to one degree or another. As Dr. Maksut elaborated, “[The] Hispanic population had some of the lowest scores achieved in the report, particularly in a handful of southern and southeastern states, including Arkansas, Georgia, Oklahoma, and Texas. This group tended to have among the lowest performance on measures of affordable access to health care.”
AIAN = American Indian and Alaska Native. Two years of data are combined for sufficient sample size by race/ethnicity
Research Associate Kristen Kolb, meanwhile, is in the Tracking Health System Performance and Expanding Coverage and Access programs. As Little Rock Public Radio reports, Kolb says new policy changes on the national level are expected to make health disparities and outcomes even worse.
As Kolb explains, it will represent a setback in health outcomes for the groups. “2022 to 2024 saw real gains. But Medicaid unwinding, marketplace changes and new restrictions affecting immigrants and asylees are now eroding access with disproportionate impacts to American Indian, Alaskan Native, Black and Hispanic communities.”
Texas Health Disparities
That same Commonwealth Fund report also finds that Texas has worse racial and ethnic health disparities than other states in the southwest. Among the groups monitored in the research, Hispanic people experience the worst health outcomes, access and quality in Texas. As Texas Public Radio reports, Joseph Betancourt, M.D., M.P.H., is the president of the Commonwealth Fund. “Our concerns today are real. And I think that's what we're beginning to see. Our data doesn't reflect that quite yet.”
Texas ranks 45th, just ahead of Oklahoma, which ranks 46th, and as mentioned above, Arkansas, ranks last out of 48 states, plus the District of Columbia for health system performance for the Hispanic population. For context, Arkansas also ranked 48th in 2025, 47th in 2023, 44th in 2022, and 42nd in 2020.
Just as Kristen Kolb referenced for Arkansas, the 2026 study was unable to fully account for the very latest changes to governmental health policies yet in Texas, primarily from provisions included in The One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBBA), signed into law on July 4, 2025, while researchers were still in the midst of their latest work.
Among the myriad changes, provisions included funding cuts to Medicaid and to the federal health insurance marketplace, of which Dr. Betancourt made a passing reference to, in his final quote (see above). In both Arkansas and Texas, researchers say they expect those policy changes will only exacerbate existing problems; the only question is, to what extent?
