2009 Healthiest and Unhealthiest States and their 2008 Electoral Votes [View All]

[Tom Rinaldo]

Forbes Magazine, which has never been called a liberal rag by the Right, recently published a 2009 national survey by the United Health Foundation entitled: "The Healthiest And Unhealthiest States". The funder for this foundation is none other than insurer UnitedHealth Group. In their most recent quarterly earnings report (October 2009) UnitedHealth Group cited revenues of $21.7 Billion, an 8% Year-Over-Year increase, and healthy profits. So no one can rationally accuse this health survey of being a hit job on the insurance industry. In truth it is chock full of interesting and useful health data, and worthy of close study, but what jumped out for me immediately are some bold political implications that it also documents. They are far from friendly to opponents of health care legislation currently before Congress.

They succinctly describe their methodology in the preface to the survey:

"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."

Specific charts ranking states in a number of health related areas are included, but the one most eyes will turn to first is a simple ranking of all States, from one to fifty, with the healthiest State number one and the unhealthiest State number 50. I took that data and did a quick overlay of it on a 2008 Presidential Election electoral map. The results sadly are no surprise though they should be shocking. Keeping in mind that McCain/Palin didn't win all that many electoral votes to start with, less than half the total that Obama/Biden gathered - with 385 for Obama and 173 for McCain, the Republicans would have won in a total blow out if only unhealthy State votes were counted.

Comparing the electoral vote breakdown for both the 15 healthiest States and the 15 unhealthiest States; Obama was ahead 72 to 8 votes in the 15 healthiest states and McCain was ahead by 129 to 47 votes in the 15 unhealthiest states. But those results are in a way misleading, because Obama got 42 of those votes from the 14th and 15th unhealthiest States; North Carolina and Florida. If instead we only tabulate the top ten healthiest and unhealthiest States, the results are even more dramatic and one sided. Obama won by 37 to 5 electoral votes in the 10 healthiest States; McCain won by 78 to 5 in the 10 unhealthiest States.

Further more, in this surveys listing of the top ten states showing annual improvement in overall health, Obama swept 9 our of 10 of them in the 2008 elections. He failed only to win Alaska which is number 8 on the improving chart but still ranked 34th overall in citizen health. All of this begs the question: Who in their right mind would trust letting representatives in Congress from the states doing the worst job at providing for the health of their citizens dictate health care reform for all Americans? Overwhelmingly Republicans in Congress, who almost unanimously oppose Obama's health care reform efforts, were elected from States and districts with the unhealthiest residents in America. How can anyone continue to pretend that the National Republican Party has any credibility in this area?

Link to the source Forbes Magazine story:

Lists & Rankings
The Healthiest And Unhealthiest States
Rebecca Ruiz, 11.17.09, 12:01 AM EST
http://www.forbes.com/2009/11/16/unhealthy-healthy-states-lifestyle-health-states-top_chart.html