Today, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and our own University of Wisconsin’s Population Health Institute have released the fourth annual County Health Rankings. Nearly every county in the country is ranked on health outcomes (how healthy we are) and on health factors (how healthy we can be).
Examples of specific measures used to calculate the rankings include: rates of childhood poverty, rates of smoking, obesity levels, teen birth rates, access to physicians and dentists, rates of high school graduation and college attendance, access to healthy foods, levels of physical inactivity, and percentages of children living in single parent households. This information helps counties see where they are doing well and where improvement is needed to ensure that every community is a healthy place to live, learn, work, and play. Learn more here.
One of the elements contributing to the ranking of the health factors for counties is access to care, including the number of uninsured individuals. As we’re in the midst of a critical policy dialogue about how we’re going to provide coverage to individuals in Wisconsin – specifically, whether or not we take the federal dollars in the Affordable Care Act (ACA) to provide BadgerCare to low-income adults – the overall health of our population should be part of the discussion.
As we indicated in a WCCF paper late last year, regarding who has the potential to gain access to insurance under the ACA, rural counties have much at stake because they tend to have the highest percentages of uninsured adults. The new county-level maps showing the rankings for health outcomes and health factors reveal much the same pattern – with rural areas and the urban southeast counties having lower overall rankings. Utilizing the ACA to close the gap in BadgerCare and implement strong insurance exchanges will be particularly important in those counties because of the higher percentage of uninsured adults with income below 400% of the poverty level who can potentially gain coverage from the federal law.
Overall, the County Health Rankings illustrate what we know when it comes to what’s making people sick or healthy, while the County Health Road Maps show what we can do to create healthier places to live, learn, work, and play. Both components are part of a collaborative effort between the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the University of Wisconsin Population Health Institute to help communities across the country understand how they compare to other communities, where they can improve, and effective strategies for achieving improvements.
Have some fun exploring their interactive website today, and help your county (and our state) move in a healthier direction. Wisconsin has a critical policy choice in this budget that could help influence residents’ health factors. Legislators should take advantage of federal dollars to cover more Wisconsinites through BadgerCare at a lower cost to our state.
Sara Eskrich
