The Virginia Commonwealth University Center on Human Needs, together with the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, have made available the County Health Calculator, an online simulation tool that shows how many lives would be saved if a county, state or the nation had the health benefits that exist in areas with higher levels of college education or income. The interactive tool allows users to move a slider bar to examine how mortality would be affected if more favorable socioeconomic conditions existed for the United States, or a specific state or county.

“The goal of this effort is to help the public and policy makers get a better appreciation of how deeply health is linked to the conditions in which we live. There’s a tendency to assume that health is determined by health care, but this project focuses attention on the powerful influence of socioeconomic conditions,” said Steven H. Woolf, M.D., M.P.H., director of the VCU Center on Human Needs and professor in the Department of Family Medicine.