What’s wrong with this Picture?
Posted: April 4, 2013 Filed under: Women's Healthcare | Tags: female mortality rates in the USA 21 Comments
I suppose I should tell you more about what this multi-colored map of the US means before asking a set of questions including wtf is wrong with our country? No, this isn’t an indicator of which counties in the USA are ‘red’ v. ‘blue’ in the republican vs. democratic party scheme of things. However, before we go much further, I would like you to notice that most of the blue areas do line up with more democratically-inclined parts of the country. I can’t say that there’s a correlation however beyond the eyeball kind because that’s not in the data set.
What is in the data set should appall you. Red means “worsening” female mortality.
There is a frightening graph in a recent article in Health Affairs by David Kindig and Erika Cheng. Kindig and Cheng looked at trends in male and female mortality rates from 1992–96 to 2002–06 in 3,140 US counties. What they found was that female mortality rates increased in 42.8% of counties (male mortality rates increased in only 3.4%). The counties are mapped below: red means that female mortality worsened. You can see a strong regional pattern: just about every county showed had worsened female mortality in several southern states, while no county showed such decline in New England. There are many questions about what explains this pattern. For example, did healthier women migrate out of the south from 1992 to 2006? Nevertheless, the map depicts a shocking pattern of female hardship, primarily in the southeast and midwest.
Read that bolded (mine) statement again. It’s an outrageous statement of fact representing an unbelievable statement of what the current and future outlook of the USA will be. This undoubtedly impacts children too.
“Although we are accustomed to seeing varying rates of mortality reduction in states and nations,” Kindig and Cheng write, “it is striking and discouraging to find female mortality rates on the rise in 42.8 percent of US counties, despite increasing medical care expenditures and public health efforts.”
Kindig and Cheng looked at a number of factors that might give some context for why female morality went up in some counties but down in others. A somewhat surprising finding was that the availability of medical care — measured by the number of primary care providers or percentage of uninsured — didn’t really make a difference.
“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.”
Here’s a great question by Incidental Economist Austin Frakt. (Bold mine again.)
I speculate, but do not have the expertise to test, that what we are seeing is that the widely discussed increase in economic inequality in late 20th century America is also an increase in geographic inequality. My guess is that not only are rich Americans rapidly pulling ahead of poor Americans, but that these groups are also increasingly segregated by region.
It takes a family and a village to raise a child. What happens when the moms in the village all get crushed?
Just think about this in terms of the number of women that will not be able to access health care in the near future because Legislatures in those same states are defunding Planned Parenthood which is one of the major source of low-cost to free healthcare for low income women? I’m shuddering at what those same statistics will grow to in the next five years. We need to seriously rethink our priorities in this country.
peej
Carissa
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Mona (aka Wonk the Vote)
Sky Dancing 
This all affirms what Hillary said about how a society fails. When women are not treated fairly their socio-economic status falls and therefore their access to healthcare falls and they start to die off. You think the U.S. treats women oppressively now? Wait until the men start to outnumber the women. That map is shocking.
This really shouldn’t be surprising, since infant mortality rates in the US have been rising for decades. Our health care system is expensive and not all that good considering how much we spend. Income inequality is probably a big factor too, of course as well as the fact that women earn less money and often fall into poverty after divorce–which is extremely common.
Sorry for the OT–just wanted to say that the young woman who got lost hiking on Sunday has been rescued. We were talking about it on the morning thread.
Glad to hear she’s safe.
Anyone hiking needs to carry extra clothing, food, water — plus map & compass and know how to use them!
yep.
Also OT– There’s a big twitter-fight going on because Obama made an inappropriate remark about Kamala Harris, calling her “by far the best looking Attorney General.” Jonathan Chait gets it, but most of the males on Twitter don’t. Zerlina Maxwell is getting beat up again over it.
Someone should ask Obama about Martha Coakley. Is she a worse attorney general because she’s not the “best looking?” Sweetie…
I saw that … sheesh… it’s a boy’s world after all
It’s so fascinating that men think they get to decide how a woman feels when some stranger comments on her looks in public. I haven’t seen one woman agreeing with them, yet they just don’t get it.
how about this for weird?
The @DailyCaller has a story saying Family Research Council head Tony Perkins might challenge @SenLandrieu http://bit.ly/Xgxc61
we might as well run david duke again except he left the country
Could he win?
I don’t think so.
Disgusting.
OK, put me down for some gender sensitivity training. It wasn’t smart but it was probably Obama trying to be amusing.
What Obama said wasn’t the end of the world, but the way Zerlina Maxwell was attacked all over again was offensive. She was talking about having men comment on your appearance on the street, which most women have experienced. It can be humiliating and frightening. Jonathan Chait made the point that Obama should be setting an example.
From Susie — an article listing some the many super rich who have cash stashed in off shore tax havens.
http://www.icij.org/offshore/secret-files-expose-offshores-global-impact
I’ve been following that. It’s an amazing journalistic accomplishment–journalists all over the world participated.
That was a fascinating read. I read that earlier
Exxon must be on the list…………let me go read it. Dak, we need to overcome the obstacles of female mortality, because what is happening is society is once again closing the doors on women. From the map it looks like it is worsening, and more women are getting slammed at the doors, even though more have received higher education than in the past. I don’t think they had alzheimer’s back in the day, and it is likely a cause too.
I remember when women came together to provide the help for women, when we open doors with women’s health clinics and planned parenthood. It was women helping women. I think alot of has to do with stress. Going to work, then coming home and doing a second shift to care for husbands, and children, and this “heat and serve” crap that women got caught up in, and we didn’t have coping skills, and I think that has contributed to early mortality rates too.
It’s real, the rich have a comfort zone with all the bells and whistles, and children, and the wife doesn’t have to work, and the husband is out golfing. She jumps in the swimming pool, and has all the help she needs, daisy the maid, sam the lawnman, and on and on it goes. You got it right, Dak.
More of that from the media please. Name names and kick asses.
If you want to see someone who really needs sensitivity training, check out my new post.
I was unaware that the CDC had stopped counting maternal mortality rates in 2008. I’m wondering under what WH regime and why it is still in effect. Someone needs to make a stink about that because it directly ties in to abortion and women’s care. Hide that stat, and we lose.
Its the same game as when the repugs stopped stats on womens’ employment, and Pelosi, et al got reinstated.