Women's Health is Getting Worse in 43% of U.S. counties

Source: Bill Gardner via The Washington Post Wonkblog

I quote from the blog post by Sarah Kliff where she is citing research by David Kindig and Erika Cheng:

“Female mortality rates were not predicted by any of the medical care factors,” they write. 

What could predict worsening mortality rates, however, were socioeconomic factors. 

“Many people believe that medical care and individual behaviors such as exercise, diet, and smoking are the primary reasons for declines in health,” the authors write. “We did find significant associations between mortality rates and some of these factors, such as smoking rates for both sexes. But socioeconomic factors such as the percentage of a county’s population with a college education and the rate of children living in poverty had equally strong or stronger relationships to fluctuations in mortality rates.”

The data compare 1992 and 2006, before the crisis of 2007 and the Great Recession (which I assume made things worse). It is unconscionable that with the improvement in health information and medical technology, that health status is getting worse in so many areas of the United States.