Health Insurance Arizona: Benefits for Residents
• Deaths caused by cardiovascular disease has decreased over the past ten years to 218.3 deaths per 100,000 people.
• Deaths caused by cancer has decreased.
• The percentage of Arizona residents that smoke has decreased to 13.5 percent of the state’s population.
• The percentage of children growing up in poverty or low income households has decreased to 27.3 percent.
Health Insurance Arizona: Challenges for Residents
• A large part of the population is uninsured.
• Higher than average high school dropout rate.
• Almost 1.2 million people in Arizona are obese.
• Over 543,000 Arizona adults have been diagnosed as diabetic, an amount which has doubled in the past decade.
Additional health insurance Arizona programs include a high risk pool program. This program began in 2010 as an answer to the state’s growing health problems. The high risk pool program is a way for health insurance Arizona to be offered to people who need health care coverage and don’t have access to it, despite having enough money.
These patients also normally have pre-existing conditions and health concerns that may have made it more difficult to obtain health insurance Arizona. High risk pools are funded by the state that supports them. Health insurance Arizona companies contribute money to the pool.
Another health insurance initiative in Arizona is a federal health reform bill called the Affordable Care Act. This act was created in 2010 to give over $16 billion, in the span of a decade, to produce health preventive programs that will help decrease the amount of Arizona residents suffering from issues like smoking or childhood obesity.
Overall, the citizens in Arizona are slowly improving their health and helped their state increase its rankings to the 29th healthiest state in the United States.