When you have kids, or your own chronic health issues, medical care factors into your life the same way eating, sleeping and breathing do – as a potentially life or death component.

I think about all this stuff a lot, especially since I’ve rarely had the right kind of insurance, but the five years in which I did was amazing. When you’ve had nothing or nothing but Medi-Cal your whole adult life, having legitimate insurance is akin to miraculous. Medical staff treats you better. You have options. (I was very sad to see all that go.)

I’ve written before about my hospital experiences over the years. I’ve asserted that the one good thing to come out of being slow to diagnose Nick’s diabetes is that because he was so sick, they flew him to UCSF, which meant we had far better care than he could have received here. Of course, it also meant that we had to drive 560 miles roundtrip each time he had an appointment, but such is living somewhere rural – right?

And maybe we don’t have the broadest, most cutting-edge array when seeking health care here in Humboldt, but we do have all the ingredients for a healthy lifestyle: fresh vegetables, plenty of water, all kinds of outdoor exercise opportunities, strong communities, a relatively mild climate (at least here on the coast) and a culture that supports mediation, yoga and seeking the highest level of emotional health. The bad elements – drug addiction, limited mental health resources, violent crime – those could happen anywhere. Right? And even if you live somewhere with plenty of doctors and advanced technology, if you don’t have the right kind of insurance, you’re still going to end up at the poor folks’ clinic.

So when I saw the latest county health rankings had been released, I looked to see where Humboldt wound up: #34 out of 57.

It’s fascinating.

  • We do well on “Quality of Life” (#9, just below the #1 overall healthiest county, Marin, at #8), but only have about half the number of physicians per capita – although we’re right in line with the state average.
  • We do badly on “Length of life,” coming in at #49 out of the 57 California counties – but we’re improving, which means we have less premature deaths than we used to.
  • For a people surrounded by all the aforementioned healthy lifestyle ingredients, we do surprisingly poorly on “Health Behaviors” – a pathetic #41.
  • Measures by which we are getting worse include obesity, number of people uninsured and number of children in poverty.
  • Measures by which we are getting better are, as mentioned, length of life (do you really want to live forever?), plus we’re getting more physically active, have fewer preventative hospital stays, better diabetic monitoring (yay!) and increasingly good air quality.

The report is wonderfully interactive – again, you can check it out here.

Below, a snapshot of #34 Humboldt vs. #1 Marin.

Humboldt v Marin