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Public Health

Vetted resources and information on current public health events.

Health, United States

For more than 40 years, Health, United States has provided an annual picture of the health of the nation across four subject areas: 

  • health status and determinants
  • health care utilization
  • health care resources
  • health expenditures and payers

Health, United States provides a wide array of trends in health statistics to policymakers, public health professionals, and the public. It presents statistics in four overarching areas: health status and determinants, health care utilization, health care resources, and health expenditures and payers. In addition to presenting key findings from the major data collection systems of the National Center for Health Statistics and other CDC programs, Health, United States uses data from other federal agencies, as well as private and global sources.

The Health, United States annual reports document the changes in the nation’s health, as well the emergence of new threats to public health.  


Changes to Health, United States 2020-2021

Health, United States, 2020–2021 is the 44th edition of the congressionally mandated annual reporting on health statistics. Over the years, the Health, United States program has updated how it reports data based on the ways that readers search for, access, and use health statistics. To better meet the needs of today’s readers, Health, United States materials will be published online periodically throughout the year. This change will better align releases with data availability from more than 40 data sources.

The cornerstone of the redesigned Health, United States are the trend tables. These trend tables provide data supporting analyses in topic pages, including key findings, featured charts, and trend analyses on a given health topic. The topic pages also contain links to detailed methodology available on a new Sources and Definitions page. Trend tables are indexed through the searchable Data Finder.

Annual Report

Starting with the 2020–2021 edition, a brief annual report—the Health, United States: Annual Perspective—will integrate selected analyses from the Health, United States topics released online. This report is submitted on behalf of the Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services to the President and Congress in compliance with Section 308 of the Public Health Service Act.

Each Annual Perspective explores a theme across multiple indicators and data sources, and the theme for the 44th edition is health disparities. Health, United States reports prior to the redesigned 2020–2021 edition are available from the Previous Reports page.


Health, United States Annual Report

The Health, United States, 2020-2021: Annual Perspective is a brief annual report that integrates selected analyses on health trends reported online by the Health, United States program. As part of the program’s legislative mandate, Health, United States is charged with presenting a comprehensive set of health topics, and examining trends in health status and determinants, healthcare utilization, healthcare resources, and health expenditures and payers. Health, United States provides a detailed look at these topics within specific demographic and socioeconomic groups, including age, sex, race and ethnicity, disability status, education, poverty level, and geographic area.

Health, United States, 2020–2021 draws from data sources that were collected through the end of 2019 -- before the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. Therefore, the information presented in Health, United States, 2020–2021 provides unique national baselines for understanding the health impacts of COVID-19 -- particularly for people of racial and ethnic minority groups -- for many relevant topics including cancer and heart disease, deaths from suicide and drug overdose, and healthcare utilization and insurance.

U.S. Health Data & Statistics