Kane fifth healthiest among state's counties

Two of Chicago's collar counties are among the healthiest in the state as Kane County cracked the top five for the first time and DuPage County maintained its bronze medal spot in the 2015 rankings.

This is the sixth year the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and University of Wisconsin crafted the rankings. They use Census and American Community Survey data as well other research to develop the rankings. Each year, the rankings include additional factors about education, housing, crime, jobs, diet and exercise in an effort to make the rankings more meaningful and actionable.

For instance, this year the rankings included a measure of income inequality. The rankings measured income inequality via a ratio of household income at the 80th percentile to income at the 20th percentile. County residents who fall in the 80th percentile fall in the top income tier where only 20 percent of the households in the county have higher incomes. Residents in the 20th percentile live in a county where 80 percent of the households have higher incomes.

Based on that measure, Cook County has the highest level of income inequality in the Chicago area. For every Cook County resident on the low end of the income scale, there are about 5.3 residents on the high end. In contrast, the ratio in McHenry and Will counties is 3.7 to 1, placing them among the top 10 percent of counties in the United States for income equality. Kane, DuPage and Lake counties all have ratios in between the two extremes.

DuPage County maintained its No. 3 ranking by posting some of the most impressive measures that contribute to overall health. For instance, the county's 93 percent high school graduation rate was tied for No. 1 among the top 10 counties with Schuyler County. DuPage also has a much better ratio of primary care physicians per population than any other county in the top 10 at 746 to 1. Top-ranked Woodford County has a primary care physician to population ratio of 2,051 to 1.

Kane County climbed into the top rankings for the first time with a strong showing in measures of life span, access to exercise opportunities and a relatively low amount of violent crime. Keeping it from climbing higher in the ranks is an 8.9 percent unemployment rate and the fact that more that one of every four county residents is obese. The No. 5 ranking is seven spots better than when Barb Jeffers took over as executive director of the Kane County Public Health Department in 2013.

“The County Health Rankings show us that where we live matters to our health,” Jeffers said. “Even if we rank relatively high overall, we know that we can take steps to improve the health of all our residents. All of us want Kane County to be a healthier place.”

Nationally, this year's rankings show that the healthiest counties in each state have higher college attendance, fewer preventable hospital stays, and better access to parks and gymnasiums. The least healthy counties in each state have more smokers, more teen births, and more alcohol-related car crash deaths. This report also looks at distribution in income and the links between income levels and health.