The Healthy State of the USA

I am packing on about 8 extra pounds past my norm, post-pregnancy…and I say “post-pregnancy” very lightly as my second child will already be six months this week. I have fallen into the mom trap of blaming my last child for my extra weight. I know some mothers who blame their children for their “baby weight” even as their children are about to enter college…sorry, Mom. As I was at Walgreens last week picking up a prescription, I knew I had seen the last straw get trampled on as a man so graciously offered me his chair to wait due to my being pregnant (I thanked him through very thin, panic-stricken lips as I closed my coat tight around myself). That’s when I dialed up Weight Watchers and now I am on my way to losing the baby weight in addition to the 20 or so pounds I should have lost years ago. Health is an extremely important topic to me and those millions of Americans who are currently struggling to lose weight and reclaim their health. Helping in the battle is a new nonprofit website called State of the USA (stateoftheusa.org).

This new site is responsible for determining and posting the general well-being of Americans across the nation. They utilize twenty different health factors that will be used as benchmarks for Americans to check their own health status against. This site is pushing to get more pertinent health information out to American, thereby allowing them to become more informed and active about those looming issues we face everyday, including the environment, education and our health. The data will be easy to comprehend and easy to compare against the health of other countries.

There are twenty different factors that will be used to determine the general health of our nation. George Isham, the chief health officer of Health Partners, states, “This report takes an important step of capturing the health of the American people with a few key indicators. Given the gap between the relatively low performance and high costs of our health care system, data that is readily accessible on the Internet will be of great value in devising strategies to close this gap. We believe this set of measures, as deployed by the State of the USA project, can help move the nation toward better health.” The twenty different factors were chosen because of their huge impacts on the health of the nation as well as the incredible amount of data that backs each one up, making it much easier to keep track of how that data changes throughout the years. There are several different organizations that will be responsible for gathering and distributing the data for these factors each year.

The twenty different indicators include both life expectancy at the age of 65 and at birth, the number of deaths in infants under one year, the number of deaths due to injuries, the percentage of adults that report they have poor to fair health, the mean number of unhealthy (mental or physical) days reported in the previous month and the percentage of Americans who have chronic diseases (including, but not limited to, diabetes, cancer and arthritis). In terms of health behaviors, the indicators include proper nutrition, percentage of adults who are obese, the use of contraceptives like condoms (for young adults), the percentage of adults who drink to excess, the amount of physical activity adults participate in and smoking. Health systems are also used as indicators, including hospitalizations that could have been prevented, preventative services (flu shots and screenings), insurance coverage (percentage of those insured vs. those who are uninsured), health care expenses, unmet medical needs (including dental, medical and prescription drugs) and childhood immunizations.