Georgia’s obesity rate for adults is about average among states, the CDC reports. But it’s still a startlingly high figure.

Almost one in three residents in the state is obese. The overall 31.6 percent rate for 2017 in Georgia is slightly higher than the 30.5 percentage in 2014. It’s a rate that has climbed steadily, both here and nationally.

And African-Americans in Georgia have an even higher rate of obesity, a situation that also prevails at the national level.

The CDC report, released last week, also found that the South (32.4%) and the Midwest (32.3%) had the highest prevalence of obesity, followed by the ...

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Georgia’s uninsured rate ticked up slightly, to 13.4 percent, in 2017, the U.S. Census Bureau reported this week. That’s the fourth-highest rate in the nation.

The state trails only Texas, Oklahoma and Alaska. The uninsured rate in Georgia was 12.9 percent in 2016.

Nationally, 8.8 percent of people, or 28.5 million, did not have health insurance at any point during 2017, the Census Bureau said. The uninsured rate and number of uninsured were not statistically different from 2016 (8.8 percent or 28.1 million).

The Georgia numbers are “mixed news,’’ said Bill Custer, a health insurance expert at Georgia State University. “The change is small ...

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A small DeKalb County nonprofit has been given a statewide grant to provide navigators for people seeking to enroll in the Affordable Care Act insurance exchanges.

Navigators are people specially trained to advise and assist consumers who use the exchanges to buy health coverage.

Georgia Refugee Health and Mental Health, based in Clarkston, will get the state’s entire navigator funding of almost $500,000, federal health officials said Wednesday.

The organization has previously worked as a navigator entity, but with far less funding than two other organizations, Insure Georgia and the Georgia Primary Care Association.

Kathleen Connors, head of Georgia Refugee Health and Mental Health, told ...

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Hospitals, nursing homes and assisted living facilities in Georgia are receiving patients evacuating from the Carolinas as Hurricane Florence approaches the Southeastern coast, state officials said Tuesday.

Georgia appears likely to escape the brunt of the Category 4 storm as it spins toward landfall. But state health care officials are preparing for an influx of evacuees from states hard hit by the storm.

“We may have to open shelters’’ to house people fleeing Florence, Dr. Patrick O’Neal, commissioner of the Georgia Department of Public Health, said Tuesday at an agency board meeting.

HCA hospitals in South Carolina have sent patients to the Tennessee-based company’s hospitals in ...

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