Americans are making progress reducing the behaviors that lead to poorer health and higher healthcare costs, but serious challenges remain.
United Health Foundation’s annual America’s Health Rankings, released Wednesday, found that Americans made improvements in important behavioral measures, such as smoking, which dropped to 19.6 percent of the adult population from 21.2 percent, and physical inactivity, which dropped to 22.9 percent from 26.2 percent.
[See also: Unhealthy behaviors impacting quality of life, costs]
The obesity rate remained essentially unchanged (27.6 percent of the adult population in 2013 versus 27.8 percent in 2012), but the good news is that 2013 is the first year since 1998 that obesity rates didn’t get worse.
The improvements seen in the last year is great news, said Reed Tuckson, MD, United Health Foundation’s external senior medical adviser, but there is still much room for more progress.
By identifying trends in public health, tools like America’s Health Rankings can help the healthcare industry in taking part in the future progress of population health, Tuckson told Healthcare Finance News in an email.
Some of the key things that will be needed for sustained progress, wrote the authors of a report accompanying the rankings are social commitment, individual responsibility, the establishment of partnerships across groups with and without commonalities, leadership, learning from and sharing knowledge of successes and perseverance.
Among the report’s other findings:
- The five healthiest states are Hawaii, Vermont, Minnesota, Massachusetts and New Hampshire.
- The five least healthy states are Mississippi, Arkansas, Louisiana, Alabama and West Virginia.