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A New Mexico’s Health Slowly Improving
Rebecca Bennett
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Though New Mexicans enjoy low mortality rates from cancer and cardiovascular disease, there are many risk factors that must be changed if the overall health of the state is to improve, said a nonprofit health foundation.
UnitedHealth Foundation, founded by the UnitedHealth Group in 1999, released their 15th annual America’s Health: State Health Rankings – 2004 Edition early this month. The report details risk factors, such as behaviors like obesity and smoking; community environment, such as violent crime or children in poverty; and certain health policies in the state against outcomes of those risk factors, from cardiovascular and cancer deaths to premature death and infant mortality among others.
As compared to the overall health and mitigating risk factors against the other 49 states and the District of Columbia, New Mexico ranks 38th overall. The 2004 ranking marks an increase from the state’s 1996 ranking of 48th.
The results of the report are largely mixed. According to the report, “strengths” of New Mexico include a low rate of cancer deaths at 178.5 people per 100,000; low cardiovascular death rate at 284.9 people per 100,000; and a low mortality rate of 819.8 people per 100,000.
UnitedHealth detailed “challenges” to New Mexico state health in their report, most prominently the high childhood poverty rate, comprising 26.9 percent of all New Mexicans under age 18, a figure that is the worst in the nation. Other challenges include low access to adequate prenatal care, of which 56 percent of pregnant New Mexican women are able to have access to, and where there also disparities between white women and minority women; low health insurance rate, of which 22.1 percent of New Mexicans pay into; and a high violent crime rate, with 740 offenses for every 100,000 people. New Mexico’s lack of adequate prenatal care is matched only by Utah, and the state only ranks above Texas in terms of citizens without health insurance.
Some statistics indicate New Mexico’s public health policies are working in certain circumstances. For instance, the infant mortality rate dropped from 6.5 to 5.9 deaths per 1,000 live births between 2003 and 2004, and the incidence of infectious disease dropped from 64.2 to 15.8 cases per 100,000 people.
Other statistics seem to paint a different picture of New Mexico’s residents. 2.3 percent of the 2004 state health budget was allocated for public health concerns, as opposed to the 5.7 percent received in 2003. Some risk factors also appeared more frequently, such as the high school graduation rate, which indicated that 61.5 percent of New Mexico’s teenagers completed all four years of high school in 2004. In 1990, 73.2 percent of teenagers who began high school graduated within four years.
New Mexico finished 48th on the list of combined risk factors and 17th for the combined measures of outcomes, or consequences of risk factors. According to UnitedHealth, this means “the state is not likely to continue to improve its relative healthiness without additional focus on risk factors.”
UnitedHealth’s report on New Mexico and other states can be found at http://www.unitedhealthfoundation.org/shr2004/Findings.html.
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