"If you look at the nation overall, the nation hasn't done that well," Dr. Michelle Berlin, vice chair of the report and associate director of the OHSU Center for Women's Health, said during a news conference on Wednesday.
...more women are obese and more suffer from high blood pressure and diabetes. Also, fewer women are getting Pap tests for cervical cancer, and the incidence of Chlamydia and binge drinking are on the increase, the report showed.
Berlin noted that these data also vary state-to-state, so that although some goals have been met nationally, individual states may be falling behind.
"The range is pretty concerning," she said.
In fact, no state was given a overall satisfactory grade for women's health and only two states, Vermont and Massachusetts, got the next highest grade of "satisfactory minus." Thirty-seven states received an unsatisfactory grade, and 12 were given an F.
States ranking at the bottom include Alabama, Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Oklahoma and West Virginia.
Other findings in the report include:
- One in five women between the ages of 18 and 64 is uninsured, the highest rate since the U.S. Census Bureau began reporting such data.
- No state met the Healthy People 2010 goal of 100 percent of women having health insurance.
- Almost 50 percent of all pregnancies are unintended, missing the goal of reducing unintended pregnancies to 30 percent or less.
- Only seven states require that prenatal care services be covered in all individual and group health plans.
- Only eight states require private insurers to cover contraceptives.
- Nineteen states restrict private insurers' coverage of abortion services.
- The District of Columbia has the highest heart disease death rate at 174.8 deaths per 100,000.
- Hawaii has the lowest heart disease death rate at 60.9 per 100,000.
- More than 33 percent of women in Mississippi are obese, the highest rate in the nation, compared with 19 percent in Colorado, the lowest.
- Nearly 13 percent of women in West Virginia have diabetes, the highest rate in the nation, compared with 5 percent in Alaska, the lowest.
Dr. Olveen Carrasquillo, chief of the division of general internal medicine at the University of Miami Miller School of Medicine, said he was "not surprised by the report."
"The reductions in the biggest killers of women, cardiovascular disease and some cancers, are probably the biggest victories we have had in health in the last 20 years," he said. "But clearly there are a ways to go."
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