Jefferson County has its health issues: It has no hospitals, for one thing. The prevalence of cancer is relatively high, as are so-called “deaths of despair” – suicides and drug overdoses. There’s a significant disparity of poverty rates within the county.
But in the scheme of things, county residents are very, very well. How well? In this year’s survey of the nation’s healthiest communities by the magazine U.S. News & World Report, Jefferson came out fifth among rural counties and 15th overall. That’s among nearly 3,000 counties and county-equivalents. It rose from 85th overall in the magazine’s inaugural 2018 ranking.
The “Healthiest Communities” project, developed by U.S. News in collaboration with the Aetna Foundation, is an ambitious undertaking. It aggregates and analyzes data for each community against 81 metrics in 10 categories, including population health, economy, housing, and public safety. The magazine says it focused on factors that drive community health and well-being outcomes.
U.S. News says that county-level data was harvested from sources including the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, the U.S. Census Bureau, the Dartmouth Atlas of Health Care and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.
Communities were ranked overall and within broad peer groups – which means that Jefferson County was compared to rural communities with relatively high-performing economies. The top-ranked county on that list was Wyoming’s Teton County, home to the wealthy resort town of Jackson. The next-highest rural Montana county is Madison, at #18.
From 2018 to 2019, Jefferson’s performance against the U.S. News assessment improved markedly in several areas. It received higher scores for economic conditions, environmental factors, food and nutrition, housing and infrastructure. Education remained its relative weak spot: Per-pupil school expenditures and pre-school enrollment were lower than the means of peer communities.
The U.S. News study appears to take a broader view of the factors that determine health than does the more established “County Health Rankings and Roadmaps” published annually by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the University of Wisconsin Population Institute. In the 2019 version of that study, which does not produce a national ranking, Jefferson placed fourth out of 48 Montana counties measured.
View the full rankings at www.usnews.com/news/healthiest-communities/rankings.
