Surprise, we are the least healthy county in the state!
Please note: This article is published as an archive copy from Philadelphia City Paper. My City Paper is not affiliated with Philadelphia City Paper. Philadelphia City Paper was an alternative weekly newspaper in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. The last edition was published on October 8, 2015.
We didn't even beat Pittsburgh?
A new study of county-to-county health funded by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation was just released, and, surprise! Philadelphia is not healthy. In fact, it's the least healthy. We are the 67th healthiest county in Pennsylvania, out of 67 counties. Seriously, we're that much less healthy than Pittsburgh? Yeah, looks like it.
So to generalize, the ranking of Pennsylvania counties' healthiness goes, from best to worst:
- Big college towns
- Philadelphia suburbs
- Pittsburgh suburbs
- Pittsburgh
- Pennsyltucky
- Counties directly above big anthracite coal deposits
- Philadelphia
We usually love to go into the data sets of these things and pick them apart, and we were trying to do that with this one — especially the part where the number of years of potential life lost (YPLL) in cases of premature death is an enormous factor in the "health outcome" ranking. "Don't get shot at age 19" (or "don't work in a coal mine") are not high on the list of practical health advice, but each person who dies very young would skew the average YPLL by quite a bit. And Philadelphia's drug situation means that a lot of people die very young.
But that doesn't even matter. Philly did terribly enough on the actual things that do matter — access to health care, obesity, self-reported health — that the ranking seems pretty legit. You can check out the data here.
