Women in the United States face a growing number of threats to their health and well-being, a new report says, and there are vast disparities from state to state. <\/p>\n
In their inaugural state-by-state analysis on women\u2019s health, researchers at the Commonwealth Fund, a private foundation focused on health issues, collected data on health care quality, outcomes and access for women in the US. The data came from several sources, including the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the researchers evaluated states on 32 specific metrics, scoring them relative to each other. <\/p>\n
The report, released Thursday, reveals that states in the Northeast scored highest. Massachusetts came out on top as \u201cthe best-performing health system for women overall,\u201d with Vermont, Rhode Island, Connecticut and New Hampshire rounding out the top five. <\/p>\n
The poorest performers were spread across the southern half of the country. Mississippi had the lowest score overall, followed by Texas, Nevada, Oklahoma and Arkansas. <\/p>\n
\u201cThis is the very first time we at the Fund have created a scorecard exclusively focused on states\u2019 performance in reproductive care and women\u2019s health,\u201d said Dr. Joseph Betancourt, president of the Commonwealth Fund. <\/p>\n
\u201cWhile some states undoubtedly are championing women\u2019s continued access to vital health and reproductive services, many others are failing to ensure that women can get and afford the health care they need. This failure is having a disproportionate impact on women of color and women with low incomes,\u201d he said. \u201cMy hope is that policymakers can use these findings to identify and address gaps in care, guaranteeing that all women across the United States can live healthy lives with access to quality, affordable care \u2013 no matter where they live or what their background is.\u201d <\/p>\n
The new report reveals that life expectancy for US women is the lowest it\u2019s been in nearly two decades \u2013 since 2006. <\/p>\n
\u201cThe health of women in the United States is in a perilous place,\u201d the authors wrote, highlighting nationwide increases in deaths from preventable causes, as well as significant state-by-state differences in how many women are dying in reproductive age. <\/p>\n
In 2022, the mortality rate ranged from about 204 deaths for every 100,000 women of reproductive age in West Virginia to around 71 deaths per 100,000 in Hawaii, the report says. <\/p>\n
\u201cWe looked at deaths from all causes among women and girls ages 15 to 44, a common way to identify women of reproductive age, and we found a threefold difference across states, with the highest rates of death concentrated in the Southeastern states,\u201d said David Radley, a senior scientist for the Commonwealth Fund\u2019s Tracking Health System Performance initiative. <\/p>\n
Causes of death included those related to pregnancy \u2013 with mental health conditions as the most frequently reported cause of preventable pregnancy-related deaths \u2013 as well as other preventable causes such as substance use, Covid-19 and treatable chronic health conditions. The report also noted that the maternal death rate nearly doubled between 2018 and 2022, with rates for Black and American Indian and Alaska Native women increasing the most. <\/p>\n
Deaths from breast and cervical cancer also are considered in the new report as preventable and treatable with timely screening and health care. Breast and cervical cancer deaths were found to be highest in Southern states. <\/p>\n
\u201cWe also saw big differences across states in women\u2019s ability to access care,\u201d Radley said. \u201cThe state of health care for women in this country is in a vulnerable place.\u201d <\/p>\n
A fractured landscape of health policies \u2013 including Medicaid coverage and access to abortion and reproductive care \u2013 contributes to significant state-level inequalities for women across the country, according to the new report. <\/p>\n
\u201cWe found big differences across states in a woman\u2019s ability to access reproductive health care services, the quality of care she\u2019s likely to receive and the outcomes she\u2019s likely to experience,\u201d Radley said. \u201cWe looked at insurance coverage and found that uninsured rates among women ranged from 2.5% to over 20% uninsured, with the highest uninsured rates in states that have not expanded their Medicaid programs.\u201d <\/p>\n
Expanding Medicaid coverage to cover more people with household incomes below a certain level is linked with lower rates of maternal mortality, smaller racial and ethnic disparities in maternal mortality and infant health outcomes, and broader use of reproductive health care services, according to the report. The three states with the lowest maternal mortality rates \u2013 Vermont, California and Connecticut \u2013 have all expanded Medicaid. <\/p>\n
Ten states have not expanded Medicaid \u2013 Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Kansas, Mississippi, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Wisconsin and Wyoming \u2013 leaving about 800,000 women uninsured. Each of those states, except for Wisconsin, ranked below the average on women\u2019s health. <\/p>\n
Women in states that had not expanded Medicaid eligibility were among those most at risk of lacking insurance coverage, the researchers found. Among women ages 15 to 44, those in Texas, Georgia and Oklahoma had the highest rates of being uninsured. Those in Massachusetts, the District of Columbia and Vermont had the lowest uninsured rates. <\/p>\n
\u201cBut access isn\u2019t just about having coverage, it\u2019s also about being able to get to a service provider when care is needed. It\u2019s estimated that over 5 million women already live in a county that\u2019s considered a maternity care desert, meaning there\u2019s no hospital or birth center offering obstetric care and there are no obstetric providers,\u201d Radley said. <\/p>\n
\u201cWe looked at the adequacy of the maternity care workforce in each state and found that states with the most restrictive abortion policies also tended to have the fewest maternity care providers,\u201d he said. \u201cThere\u2019s concern among experts that abortion bans and restrictions may reduce the number of maternity care providers even further.\u201d <\/p>\n
States with abortion restrictions tend to have the fewest maternity care providers, higher rates of maternal mortality and broad disparities in health systems, according to the new report. <\/p>\n
Fourteen states \u2013 Alabama, Arkansas, Idaho, Indiana, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, North Dakota, Oklahoma, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas and West Virginia \u2013 have enacted near-total bans on abortion since the US Supreme Court\u2019s Dobbs decision revoked the federal right to abortion two years ago. All but one of those states ranked below average in the new ranking of women\u2019s health from the Commonwealth Fund, and seven were among the poorest-performing states. <\/p>\n
The policy choices that state lawmakers put forth, including fully expanding Medicaid and imposing abortion restrictions, have \u201cclearly had implications for people in their states,\u201d said Sara Collins, senior scholar and vice president for health care coverage and access and tracking health system performance at the Commonwealth Fund. <\/p>\n
\u201cThose are clear policy choices that states are making that are linked to the politics in their state and that are having an impact on women\u2019s access to health care,\u201d Collins said. <\/p>\n
\u201cAre those divides that we\u2019re seeing going to continue into the future?\u201d she asked. \u201cAre there going to be more women who are living in states that don\u2019t have full access to reproductive health care? Or are those trends going to reverse? And a lot of that is tied to the politics, both in states but also at the federal level.\u201d <\/p>\n<\/p>\n
Women in the United States face a growing number of threats to their health and well-being, a new report says, and there are vast disparities from state to state. In their inaugural state-by-state analysis on women\u2019s health, researchers at the Commonwealth Fund, a private foundation focused on health issues, collected data on health care quality, …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1206,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"loftocean_post_primary_category":0,"loftocean_post_format_gallery":"","loftocean_post_format_gallery_ids":"","loftocean_post_format_gallery_urls":"","loftocean_post_format_video_id":0,"loftocean_post_format_video_url":"","loftocean_post_format_video_type":"","loftocean_post_format_video":"","loftocean_post_format_audio_type":"","loftocean_post_format_audio_url":"","loftocean_post_format_audio_id":0,"loftocean_post_format_audio":"","loftocean-featured-post":"","loftocean-like-count":0,"loftocean-view-count":681,"tinysalt_single_post_intro_label":"","tinysalt_single_post_intro_description":"","tinysalt_hide_post_featured_image":"","tinysalt_post_featured_media_position":"","tinysalt_single_site_header_source":"","tinysalt_single_custom_site_header":"0","tinysalt_single_custom_sticky_site_header":"0","tinysalt_single_custom_sticky_site_header_style":"sticky-scroll-up","tinysalt_single_site_footer_source":"","tinysalt_single_custom_site_footer":"0","footnotes":""},"categories":[35],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1205","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-health-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/retirednurseblog.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1205","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/retirednurseblog.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/retirednurseblog.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/retirednurseblog.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/retirednurseblog.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1205"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/retirednurseblog.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1205\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/retirednurseblog.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1206"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/retirednurseblog.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1205"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/retirednurseblog.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1205"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/retirednurseblog.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1205"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}