You Can Take the Patient Out of the County, but Can You Take the County…?
What if improving your health was as simple as packing up and moving to a healthier county? That doesn’t sound plausible — nonetheless, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation just released findings from a national survey of the healthiest and unhealthiest counties in America.
For instance, if you reside near the Oregon border in Del Norte, California (where health outcomes rank 56), you may want to consider moving to Marin County near San Francisco (where health outcomes rank 1).
Good point. Is it the county or the people that generates the difference in healh outcomes? Put differently, if you switched the populations of two counties, would you also switch the health outcomes.
The wider point is: What is the point?
I’m not surprised Marin County is relatively healthy. However, I would have assumed Del Norte, would have been pretty healthy as well. I doubt if the county has any impact on the health of the population.
Does this study mean something more than the self evident observation that some people are healthier than others?
The correlation between health and geography seems tenuous to me.
People who live in the United States are more healthy than people who live in Kenya, but doesn’t it have more to do with commerce, politics and economics than it does with geography?