Excerpt: Scrape off the color on the red states and the blue states and underneath is a different way of looking at America's regional differences. There are the smoking states and the obesity states; the high-infant-mortality states and the stay-in-high-school states; the heart attack states and the killed-on-the-job states. Today, for the 15th time, a public health organization is releasing its assessment of the health of the nation, ..., as measured by a composite of 18 variables.