10 Healthiest U.S. Metro Areas

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Related: The 10 Sickest U.S. Metro Areas

Clients in some parts of the country get what amounts to a health dividend.

One place to look for information about geographic wellness assets is the website of the Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System, a U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention program that interviews about 400,000 U.S. residents ages 18 and older every year.

Interviewers ask many general and specific questions about the participants’ health, and one is about the participants’ assessment of their own health.

For a look at the 10 metropolitan areas where the highest percentage of survey participants described their own health as excellent, see the gallery above.

For data on all metropolitan areas, and some micropolitan areas, included in this analysis, see the table below.

What It Means

Good health can help make any financial problems a little more bearable, and it may increase clients’ ability to earn a good living.

In an area where many clients are in great health, financial advisors and insurance agents may have an easier time helping clients get products that involve medical underwriting, such as life insurance, disability insurance and long-term care insurance.

They may also have an easier time helping clients recognize, and use annuities and other arrangements to prepare for, the possibility that they could live into their 100s, or even into their 110s.

But advisors and agents in areas with high self-reported levels of excellent health also face another concern: the possibility that people in some areas are more likely to exaggerate how healthy they are.

In those areas, insurance agents might be more likely to face clients who expect to get super-preferred life insurance premiums and barely qualify to buy coverage at any price.

When financial professionals believe that people in an area are more likely to give a survey team unrealistically cheerful assessments of their health, they may have to spend more time helping clients notice, acknowledge, talk about and manage unpleasant realities.

The Methods

The CDC’s BRFSS asks general status questions along with questions about matters such as arthritis and binge drinking.

The goal of the program is to help federal and state programs manage public health programs.

For this article, we used BRFSS city data. Users can also get state-level, county-level and ZIP Code-level BRFSS data. The newest BRFSS city results now available in ordinary spreadsheets are for 2020.

The Pandemic Effect

Insurers and others with an interest in public health will use BRFSS data, and data from similar programs, to assess how the COVID-19 pandemic and pandemic side effects — such as lockdowns and vaccination programs — have affected people’s health.

One counterintuitive early finding: In 2020, the pandemic and pandemic control efforts might have improved Americans’ health, or at least their attitudes about their health.

The percentage of BRFFS survey takers who described their health as excellent increased to about 21.7% in 2020. That was up from 17.6% the year before, and up from 19.1% in 2015.

U.S. Excellent Health Levels

(Image: Adobe Stock)

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