America’s Health Rankings: New England States Continue to Rank Among Top Ten of Healthiest States

The 2012 edition of America’s Health Rankings shows the six New England states each made the top ten of the list of healthiest states this year.

The rankings:
      1 – Vermont
      3 – New Hampshire
      4 – Massachusetts
      6 – Connecticut
      9 – Maine
      10- Rhode Island

This annual report, by the United Health Foundation, looks at four groups of health determinants:

• behaviors (including the everyday activities people do that affect personal health, including habits and practices people develop as individuals and families that have an effect on personal health and on utilization of health resources; these behaviors are modifiable with effort by the individual supported by community, policy, and clinical interventions),
• community and environment (which reflect the reality that the daily conditions in which people live have a great effect on achieving optimal individual health),
• public and health policies (indicative of the availability of resources to encourage and maintain health and the extent that public and health programs reach into the general population), and
• clinical care (reflecting the quality, appropriateness, and cost of the care received at doctors’ offices, clinics, and hospitals).

America’s Health Rankings is designed to combines individual measures of each of these determinants with the resultant health outcomes into one, comprehensive view of the health of a state. In addition, it discusses health-related influencing factors separately from health outcomes and provides related health, economic, and social information to present a comprehensive profile of the overall health of each state.

To access the complete report, please visit:

United Health Foundation: America’s Health Rankings