America's Healthiest And Unhealthiest States
New England states top this new set of rankings, while the South still lags.
This annual ranking, published by the United Health Foundation, looks at 22 indicators of health, including everything from how many children receive recommended vaccinations, to obesity and smoking rates, to cancer deaths. (Insurer UnitedHealth Group funds the foundation.) Scores for each state are determined by gathering data from a variety of government and nongovernmental databases and then calculating how much each state is better or worse than the national average for each measure. Click here to see the report. The below chart lists the final results in addition to rank changes in specific categories over the past 20 years.
FORBES
1 Vermont
2 Utah
3 Massachusetts
4 Hawaii
5 New Hampshire
6 Minnesota
7 Connecticut
8 Colorado
9 Maine
10 Rhode Island
11 Washington
12 Wisconsin
13 Oregon
14 Idaho
15 Iowa
16 Nebraska
17 North Dakota
18 New Jersey
19 Wyoming
20 South Dakota
21 Maryland
22 Virginia
23 California
24 Kansas
25 New York
26 Montana
27 Arizona
28 Pennsylvania
29 Illinois
30 Michigan
31 New Mexico
32 Delaware
33 Ohio
34 Alaska
35 Indiana
36 Florida
37 North Carolina
38 Missouri
39 Texas
40 Arkansas
41 Kentucky
42 West Virginia
43 Georgia
44 Tennessee
45 Nevada
46 South Carolina
47 Louisiana
48 Alabama
49 Oklahoma
50 Mississippi
DAR
As usual, looks very Blue at the top and Red at the bottom.
And notice how fixing is at the expense of the Blue states, to the benefit of the red states:
A Red State Booster Shot
By Alec MacGillis
Sunday, May 31, 2009
"Health-care reform may be overdue in a country with 45 million uninsured and soaring medical costs, but it will also represent a substantial wealth transfer from the North and the East to the South and the West."
Washington Post