Where More Prospects Are Getting Coronary Heart Disease: 50 States of Trend Data

In this USA map, Alaska and Michigan look good, and Arizona and North Carolina look especially bad. Most of the Southern and Mid-Atlantic states look somewhat bad, and most places west of the Missouri, aside from Montana, look OK. (Credit: Allison Bell/ALM)

Coronary heart disease is one of the forces shaping Americans' lives, U.S. health care spending and the U.S. economy.

One reason life insurers were a little slow to take COVID-19 seriously as an "extreme mortality event" is that heart disease, and cancer, are such common causes of death. It takes a lot of deaths for any other health problem to compete with heart disease as a cause of death.

Managers of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System (BRFSS) survey program collect data on participants' heart health.

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The BRFSS survey team, naturally, tends to focus on the kinds of low-income people who tend to be the most frequent users of government-run health programs, such as Medicaid.

For financial services professionals, the most interesting data may be the statistics for the highest-earning group of people in the BRFSS tables, or people from households with annual income of at least $50,000 per year.

We turned the BRFSS data for high earners into a U.S. map showing how high earners' coronary heart disease rate changed between 2013 and 2018.

For trend data for all 50 states and the District of Columbia, see the table below.

Coronary Heart Disease
The percentage of adults, with annual household income over $50,000, who say they have had angina or coronary heart disease.
The CDC behavioral risk survey team is asking here about conditions that affect the heart's blood supply.
Location	2013	2018	Change, in percentage points
Alabama	3.1	4.5	1.4
Alaska	2.9	1.7	-1.2
Arizona	1.9	4.2	2.3
Arkansas	3.3	4.5	1.2
California	2.7	2.6	-0.1
Colorado	1.8	2.1	0.3
Connecticut	2.8	2.7	-0.1
Delaware	3.5	3.7	0.2
District of Columbia	1.9	1.2	-0.7
Florida	3.8	4.1	0.3
Georgia	2.6	3.3	0.7
Guam		2.5	2.5
Hawaii	2.1	2.9	0.8
Idaho	2.8	2.3	-0.5
Illinois	3	2.6	-0.4
Indiana	2.4	3.8	1.4
Iowa	2.9	2.9	0.0
Kansas	2.9	3.1	0.2
Kentucky	3.7	3.5	-0.2
Louisiana	2.8	4.2	1.4
Maine	3.2	3.4	0.2
Maryland	2.6	3.5	0.9
Massachusetts	2	2.5	0.5
Michigan	3.3	3.7	0.4
Minnesota	1.9	2.5	0.6
Mississippi	3.1	3.9	0.8
Missouri	3.5	3.0	-0.5
Montana	2.2	3.0	0.8
Nebraska	3	3.0	0.0
Nevada	2.8	2.9	0.1
New Hampshire	2.2	2.6	0.4
New Jersey	2.8	3.1	0.3
New Mexico	2.4	2.9	0.5
New York	2.8	2.4	-0.4
North Carolina	2.4	4.7	2.3
North Dakota	2.9	3.0	0.1
Ohio	2.5	3.4	0.9
Oklahoma	3.5	4.7	1.2
Oregon	2.7	3.3	0.6
Pennsylvania	2.4	3.3	0.9
Puerto Rico	3.8		-3.8
Rhode Island	2.7	2.3	-0.4
South Carolina	3.7	3.6	-0.1
South Dakota	3.5	3.3	-0.3
Tennessee	4.1	3.3	-0.8
Texas	2.5	2.8	0.3
Utah	2	1.6	-0.4
Vermont	2.5	2.0	-0.5
Virginia	2.1	2.6	0.5
Washington	2.5	2.9	0.4
West Virginia	4.8	4.6	-0.2
Wisconsin	3.7	2.5	-1.2
Wyoming	2.5	2.2	-0.3
MEDIAN	2.8	3.0	0.3