How to Find the Best Care Anywhere

Your chest is tight... You're having trouble breathing... You're so dizzy that it's hard to stand.

So your spouse calls 911.

You're loaded into an ambulance, the sirens blaring as you're rushed to the hospital. But which hospital?

In an emergency, you don't always get your hospital of choice. Standard protocol means you're most likely going to the nearest hospital. It's likely you wouldn't think to ask what hospital you're going to, let alone ask to be taken to a specific one.

But not all hospitals provide equal care.

So when you can choose – when you're having a scheduled surgery or getting treatment for cancer, for instance – finding the right hospital is critical for good care.

Thankfully, we have a wealth of data to use for these decisions.

Last month, U.S. News & World Report released its annual hospital rankings.

The hospital evaluations measure the number of patients and their survival, infection rates, and nurse staffing. The evaluation also considers specific procedures and how transparent hospitals are with their records.

In Retirement Millionaire, I've told readers about the changes coming to health care...

Your local, small-town hospital and emergency room are going away. So if you need urgent or emergent care and you're in the middle of nowhere, be really careful where you seek treatment.

The evidence shows that it's not worth the risk to have surgery at a local hospital when you can drive another 40 minutes to a better hospital.

Knowing the difference between top-performing hospitals and those that repeatedly do poor work can mean the difference between life and death. Even if you don't plan on a hospital visit anytime soon, it's important to know the rankings of local hospitals. So do your research to make sure you find the top places for cancer, heart, gastrointestinal, and other types of care.

The U.S. News & World Report review breaks hospitals down by specialty (and even state). For instance, the top five cancer hospitals are...

U.S. News & World ReportRank	Hospital	Medicare Rating (5 being the best)
1	Mayo Clinic, Rochester, Minn.	5
2	Cleveland Clinic	4
3	Massachusetts General Hospital, Boston	4
4	Johns Hopkins Hospital, Baltimore	N/A*
5	UCLA Medical Center	4
6	New York-Presbyterian University Hospital of Columbia and Cornell	4
7	UCSF Medical Center, San Francisco	3
8	Northwestern Memorial Hospital, Chicago	3
9	Hospitals of the University of Pennsylvania-Penn Presbyterian, Philadelphia	3
10	NYU Langone Medical Center, New York	4

• Here's the U.S. News & World Report list and the state-by-state list.

• And here's the Medicare database.

• Something different: The secret history of presidential disease, sickness, and deception.