An important new trend has been seen in death rates, and it worries experts. Experts have specifically looked into Arizona’s death rates, and Matthew Roach has talked about what they found when they looked into the Arizona Department of Health Services and the trends in that.
Matthew Roach said they saw that the difference in death rates between rural and urban places was getting bigger. The differences in death rates have always been clear, but a new study from the Economic Research Service of the Department of Agriculture shows that the gap has grown over the last few decades.
Between the ages of 25 and 54, people who live in rural places are more likely than people who live in cities to die of natural causes like chronic diseases. When the death rates from different years were compared, the study found that there was a 6% difference in 1999, but by 2019 the difference had grown to 43%.
The gap is growing because more women are getting diseases that can be treated or avoided at a younger age. In the same age group, there were more deaths from natural causes in cities with less than 10,000 people.
Death rates that are going up show that people’s health is getting worse, which is a health problem that needs to be dealt with. It is getting harder to get good medical care, especially in rural places. Alan Morgan, CEO of the National Rural Health Association, said that the study shocked him but did not surprise him.
Researchers didn’t find a direct link between any of the causes, but they did say that healthcare access, cost, and quality are different in rural places compared to urban areas.
It said in the report that “Regionally, differences in how States implement Medicaid expansion under the 2010 Affordable Care Act could have greater implications for uninsured rural residents in States that do not have expansions by potentially affecting how often those at risk get medical care.”
