REPORTS
America's Health Starts With Healthy Children: How Do States Compare?
This chartbook, America's Health Starts With Healthy Children: How Do States Compare?, examines the health of children from different socioeconomic backgrounds in every state to document how healthy our nation's children are now and how healthy they could be if we as a nation were realizing our full health potential.
Overcoming Obstacles to Health
This RWJF report to the Commission provides evidence describing the current health profile of Americans looking specifically at how income, education, and race and ethnicity play a role in Americans’ health.
Reaching America's Health Potential Among Adults: A State-by-State Look at Adult Health
Reaching America’s Health Potential Among Adults: A State-by-State Look at Adult Health – the second Commission chartbook investigating health across social and economic groups – examines the differences in adults’ health based on their levels of education. Nationally and in each state there is a consistent and striking pattern: as levels of education rise, health improves.
Beyond Health Care: New Directions to a Healthier America
This Commission report, Beyond Health Care: New Directions to a Healthier America, describes the Commission's work and provides recommendations for moving forward to ensure all Americans have an opportunity to lead healthier lives.
National Survey: Health Challenges in the United States
Findings on perceived health differences in America.
ISSUE BRIEFS
Fact Sheet: Social Determinants of Health
This fact sheet provides a guide to the available Commission resources -- charts, stories, publications and more -- across all of the social factors that affect health.
Issue Brief: Message Translation
The Commission's challenge was to frame highly-specific and technical information about social determinants and health disparities into language that would resonate with a diverse group of leaders. This issue brief, Message Translation, describes the research-based process used to develop messages and shares the results for broader use.
Summary: Final Commission Meeting
The Commission held its final meeting in Washington, D.C., on October 9, 2009. Featuring organizations and policy leaders in the areas of early childhood, nutrition and physical activity, housing and the built environment, and population health, the meeting focused on current progress and the next steps necessary to make the Commission's recommendations a reality.
Fact Sheet: Improving the Health of All Americans through Better Nutrition
Poor nutrition is threatening America’s health. Today’s children may be the first in American history to live sicker and die younger than their parents’ generation. Experts warn that excess weight could reduce average life expectancy by five years or more in the next few decades.
Issue Brief: Education Matters for Health
This Commission issue brief, Education Matters for Health, discusses the large body of evidence linking education and health and examines why, across America and generations, people with more education live longer and experience better health outcomes.
Fact Sheet: Improving the Health of All Americans through Safe and Healthy Housing
Poor quality and inadequate housing contributes to health problems such as infectious and chronic diseases, injuries and inadequate childhood development.
Fact Sheet: Improving the Health of All Americans by Focusing on the Early Years of Life
Deficits in brain, cognitive and behavioral development early in life are strongly linked to important health outcomes later in life, including cardiovascular disease and stroke, hypertension, diabetes, obesity, smoking, drug use and depression.
Issue Brief: Race and Socioeconomic Factors
To understand health disparities, it is not enough to consider only race or only socioeconomic factors. Both affect health. This issue brief focuses on disparities in health itself contrasted with the well-documented disparities in health care.
Issue Brief: Work and Health
Our work affects our health in many ways – and our health affects our work. This issue brief examines how work influences our health, not only by exposing us to physical conditions that have health effects, but also by providing a setting where healthy activities and behaviors can be promoted.
Issue Brief: Housing and Health
This issue brief examines the many ways in which housing can influence health and discusses promising strategies to improve America’s health by ensuring that all Americans have healthy homes.
Issue Brief: Neighborhoods and Health
This Commission issue brief examines the current evidence linking neighborhoods and health, the opportunities for Americans to live in healthy neighborhoods, and promising programs and interventions to make neighborhoods healthier places to live, learn and play.
Issue Brief: Early Childhood Experiences and Health
This Commission issue brief investigates how the earliest years of our lives set us on paths leading toward—or away from—good health.
Economic Value of Improving the Health of Disadvantaged Americans
Technical Report for Overcoming Obstacles to Health: Report from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation to the Commission to Build a Healthier America