Where More Prospects Are Getting Coronary Heart Disease: 50 States of Trend Data

Coronary heart disease is one of the forces shaping Americans’ lives, U.S. health care spending and the U.S. economy.

One reason life insurers were a little slow to take COVID-19 seriously as an “extreme mortality event” is that heart disease, and cancer, are such common causes of death. It takes a lot of deaths for any other health problem to compete with heart disease as a cause of death.

Managers of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System (BRFSS) survey program collect data on participants’ heart health.

More articles in this Health Data Atlas collection:

• Where More Prospects Are Binge Drinking
• Where More Prospects Have Diabetes
• Where More Prospects Are Getting Kidney Disease
• Where More Prospects Are Having Lung Problems
• Where More Prospects Are Becoming Obese

The BRFSS survey team, naturally, tends to focus on the kinds of low-income people who tend to be the most frequent users of government-run health programs, such as Medicaid.

For financial services professionals, the most interesting data may be the statistics for the highest-earning group of people in the BRFSS tables, or people from households with annual income of at least $50,000 per year.