Uninsured Rates, Behavior, and Mental Health

Purpose

This analysis aims to compare the rates of poor mental health days by rates of drug overdose, excessive drinking, employment status, and health insurance coverage at the county level.

Healthy People 2030 has prioritized mental health and mental disorders, focusing on “the prevention, screening, assessment, and treatment of mental disorders and behavioral conditions” and “improve health and quality of life for people affected by these conditions.” Psychiatric disorders are a leading cause of disability in the U.S., and research has shown that individuals with health insurance are more likely to use one or more types of mental health services (Miller et al., 2016). Research has also shown disparities in mental health service use and adequacy based on race, ethnicity, and socioeconomic factors (Jimenez et al., 2013; Tsai et al., 2014). Research continues to describe an “urgent” need to address mental health and drug use disorders in the U.S. through increased access and screening (Mokdad et al., 2018, Weigel et al., 2019).

This scenario includes benchmarks for each appropriate variable. State-level benchmarks are accessible by filtering by state. Scenarios with multiple outcome variables require filtering by the specific outcome to return the corresponding benchmarks.

This data is also available as an Excel spreadsheet.

Uninsured Rates Behavior and Mental Health 2022.xlsx (387.85 KB)

Tutorial Video
Data Sources
Defining The Columns

In this tutorial video, we look at Uninsured Rates, Behavior, and Mental Health. The video guides you through how to use Tableau data analysis to compare the rates of poor mental health days by rates of drug overdose, excessive drinking, employment status, and health insurance coverage at the county level.

Uninsured Rates, Behavior, and Mental Health Tutorial Video

County Health Ranking (data released 2022)

A blank entry indicates unreported data. A value of zero is defined and does not represent unreported data.

State: The abbreviation of the state.

County: The name of the county. County names are listed on the U.S. Census Bureau's 2020 FIPS Codes for Counties and County Equivalent Entities.

Percent Uninsured: Percentage of people under age 65 without insurance. The reporting period for this measure is 2018 from the Small Area Health Insurance Estimates (SAHIE) program.

Median Household Income: Median annual household income. The reporting period for this measure is 2019 from the Small Area Income and Poverty Estimates (SAIPE).

Percent Unemployment: Percentage of the population ages 16+ unemployed and looking for work. The reporting period for this measure is 2019 from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Percent Excessive Drinking: The percentage of adults that report either binge drinking, defined as consuming more than 4 (women) or 5 (men) alcoholic beverages on a single occasion in the past 30 days, or heavy drinking, defined as drinking more than one (women) or 2 (men) drinks per day on average. The reporting period for this measure is 2018. Data is from the Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System (BRFSS) survey.

Drug Overdose Deaths per 100,000: The number of deaths due to drug poisoning per 100,000 population. The reporting period for this measure is 2017 through 2019 from CDC WONDER mortality data.

Teen Births per 1,000: Number of births per 1,000 female population ages 15-19. The reporting period for this measure is 2013 through 2019 from the National Center for Health Statistics - Natality files.

Average Poor Mental Health Days per Month: Average number of mentally unhealthy days reported in the past 30 days (age-adjusted). The reporting period for this measure is 2018. Data is from the Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System (BRFSS) survey.