Trends in Medicaid and CHIP Eligibility Over Time

Appendix A

Appendix B: Overview of America’s Health Rankings

America’s Health Ranking is produced annually by United Health Foundation, the American Public Health Association and the Partnership for Prevention (http://www.americashealthrankings.org/). The health rankings for states are developed based on four groups of health determinants, including: behaviors, community & environment, policy and clinical care, and several measures of health outcomes.

The overall health score is calculated by adding the score of each measure multiplied by the measure weight (see Table 2). The ranking is the order of each state according its overall score; ties in values are assigned equal rankings.

The score for each measure is a representation of the number of standard deviations a state is above or below the national mean. The national mean is set at the average value of the states and DC. It is calculated by:

Score = (State value – National mean)/Standard Deviation of all state values.

This is commonly known as a “Z-score”. The score is stated as a decimal ranging from positive to negative 2. Higher scores mean that a state has a higher value than the national average, while lower scores mean that the state has a lower value than the national average. Table 2 shows whether a higher value has a negative or a positive impact on the health ranking.