"In this national analysis, we found that Americans living in counties that voted Democratic during presidential elections from 2000 to 2016 experienced lower age adjusted mortality rates (AAMRs) than residents of counties that voted for a Republican candidate, and these patterns were *consistent across subgroups (sex, race and ethnicity, urban-rural location).*"
I.e. many of the tried and true methods of "explaining away" a study's result does not apply.
20 years ago a heart attack had a very high chance of death, even if you’re close to a hospital. These days, you’re much less likely to die if you get to a hospital / medic in time.
> Current smoking has declined from 20.9% (nearly 21 of every 100 adults) in 2005 to 12.5% (nearly 13 of every 100 adults) in 2020 (CDC)
Doubtful. Widespread use of statins, I should think, are a better match for that data.
It seems like everybody I know above 55 are on statins.
What about income/economic class?
Or perhaps just have better treatments?
I grew up in a "deep red" area of the Midwest. It wasn't always like this, but it seems obesity is the norm now. And obesity has many health consequences. It's probably more cultural than political, though.
If it's cost, healthy home cooked food is as cheap or even cheaper than unhealthy fast food. But so many people I talk to think it's cheaper to get fast food. If you have a shred of common sense you can make really tasty and cheap healthy food at home.
Then, on top of it, the weather's miserable 9 months out of the year. Oppressively hot & humid, or bitter cold. You're inside, you're in a pool/manmade-lake, or you're eagerly counting the minutes until you can get back to one of those places. Because of the first paragraph, incentive to brave the elements and go outside anyway, is practically zero.
IOW our natural environments and climates also discourage outdoor activity, pretty damn effectively.
[EDIT] Oh, and regarding this:
> Obviously it's not profitable to own a healthy restaurant out there, but why? Is it a lack of healthy eating education? Is it a "harder" life and junk food is a reward? Or is it cost?
It's a combination of cost and population density, mainly. Food culture plays in, but it's a feedback-loop sort of situation, not the case that food culture's purely driving the problem. Restaurants that optimize to avoid ingredients that spoil fast can charge less. Healthy ingredients tend to spoil faster than unhealthy ones (not universally true, but broadly so, especially for fruits and veggies). Higher prices (relative to local competition) mean a smaller customer base, which increases the population density required to support a restaurant.
Is it? You can get a double cheeseburger, small fries and a large soda (the worst part arguably of the whole meal health wise) for 4 dollars at McDonalds. You can skip the fries, and get 2 double cheeseburgers for the same price. The McDonalds app will often give you a large fry for free for the 4 dollar purchase.
Whats the comparable food you can be making for 4 dollars at the grocery store?
Cooking only helps when you can get economy of scale going. And only when you can use up all the ingredients you can bought effectively. Also you need the energy to make the food, if you are getting up at 7am to get your kids to school, then pick them up at 6 (when after school ends) and get home at 630, and then need to cook for 30 minutes, then another 15 to get dishes and everything put away. Your looking at not even being "done" with "work" until 715pm when you started the day at 7am. Acting like the time to cook and clean is free is not productive.
I suspect it's also something like 5x cheaper to compose healthy meals 5x healthier at home, IF one has a home in which such can be done.
[Yes, it's possible to make food in bulk on the weekends. There is no need to spam that helpful suggestion in the replies.]
I'm sympathetic to Warraich's position, but its weak that he combines the conclusions of the voter patterns and access-to-care study in an opinion article and not in a peer reviewed paper. Hopefully one is in preparation.
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/onpolitics/2016...
>In fact, Silver parsed the data to discover the average Trump voter makes $72,000 per year — a middle-class income solidly above the typical American.
>As compared with most Americans, Trump’s voters are better off. The median household income of a Trump voter so far in the primaries is about $72,000, based on estimates derived from exit polls and Census Bureau data.
>That’s lower than the $91,000 median for Kasich voters. But it’s well above the national median household income of about $56,000. It’s also higher than the median income for Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders supporters, which is around $61,000 for both.
>> But it’s well above the national median household income of about $56,000
That's household.
And the Fed wants LOWER wages. What is wrong with people!? Pay more!
I agree that if you go only at the top decile, the median democrat voter could make a bit more than the median republican voter (idk really), but if you take the whole population? I remember 2016 Sanders campaign funding.
Also, i went to West Virginia, an know the people there, happen to meet the local democrat (pro blue water, proponent of the redneck movement, basically a communist compared to the average american) and saw his electorate. I mean, they do live the good life, they eat venison and a lot of homegrown vegetables, they ride horses and sell lilies (no joke), brew their (mostly) bad beer and throw day-long parties on sunday where you jam from one PM to eleven (i improved more in two weeks there than in the last five year). But their income? i'd be surprised if they aren't in the last decile (or almost there).
It's not really this simple anymore.
Americans are sorting into the party of college grads (Democrats) and the party of non-college-grads (Republicans). This doesn't translate as neatly to income as you might think, but it's definitely a factor.
> they eat venison and a lot of homegrown vegetables, they ride horses and sell lilies (no joke), brew their (mostly) bad beer and throw day-long parties on sunday
This is not typical of any large group of voters, including in West Virginia. As someone who grew up there, I can tell you that most people buy food from Walmart. They don't grow it. There is certainly eating of venison, but frozen pizza is certainly more popular. Horses (and the riding of them) is uncommon.
Said another way, maybe counties with poor medical facilities, poorer people, etc. are more attracted to voting Republican. The title might read "The downtrodden are more attracted to Republican ideas"
Not saying this is true either it's just that the causal factors may not be part of the study. They tried to include race/color and gender but the effect is still visible across the board.
They did not study obesity or income level, which I suspect would show even stronger correlation to an increase in AAMR than what the county voted in the last election.
> Conclusion: The mortality gap in Republican voting counties compared with Democratic voting counties has grown over time, especially for white populations, and that gap began to widen after 2008.
That’s it.
with the emotion being the health outcome response, I would tend towards Yes, demagogue.
Understanding the outcomes of political choices isn’t inherently political. It’s completely reasonable for someone to say yes this saves lives but it’s still not worth the money.
Only thing I can think of that is (sort of) a political decision to “limit health care” is refusing to expand Medicaid.
I know that didn’t happen across the board for Republican counties/states, though, so what in the world are you claiming?
Are the parties causative? Or are they just the labels that we have to describe the two groups currently? We don’t know.
Or is it the other way around? Commenters occasionally often point out the "red states" are the biggest recipients of welfare in spite of being the ones that vote most against it. To me, it seems that the most likely explanation for this is that the voters there see the negative effects of welfare and the ones who are voting for it are insulated most from the unintended consequences. It could just as easily be that the voters who see the most death are voting for the party they most feel will enact policies that will lead to less of it.
Isn't the entire point of politics and political parties to change social outcomes? "Your policy X will negatively impact social outcomes because reason Y while my policy Z will positively impact them" is a huge chunk of politics.
Besides, I don't see how actually trying to measure outcomes of specific policies is "demagoguery"? The author(s) of this paper may be wrong (I didn't look too deeply at the study), but that's not the same as "demagoguery".
It's very easy to specify hypothetical laws, that if enacted and enforced, would have dramatic public health benefits. A tyrrany of health, if you will. But that doesn't mean it would be ethically acceptable. Conversely, a great many military and other actions, ethically justified, are not healthy at all for its participants.
The problem with these political appeals based on public health is that physical health per se, or even health in general, is just one of many values to be weighted in decision making. I think there's been a general creep in what "health" encompasses, while being selective in other ways. I do think this is part of the reason for pushback from certain quarters, a reaction against trying to dress up politics in the disguise of science without being honest about it.
Science is always political to some extent, I think. So trying to argue that some phenomenon is a "scientific" issue, and therefore best addressed by qualified scientists seems disingenuous to me. It's not so much that expertise isn't real, it's that it has to have limits or it's meaningless.
As I see it:
A) The paper is primarily a study of numerical trends.
B) Some potential policy causes for this difference are listed in the discussion section. While this is not the primary focus of this paper, the discussion links to several other prior studies regarding particular policies and their impacts.
C) However, more specific details (other than the above postulates) is not part of the paper's focus. This is acknowledged as a limitation in the study, and it is also acknowledged that other factors aside from policy (such as poor health or social and economic factors that may also motivate political preference) explain some of the hap. So it is important not to read too much detail into the cause of this gap at this time.
This may be just a classical correlation =/= causation error or it is campaign fodder for the upcoming elections.
Tragic.
edit: hah- I said "obesity" and "massive factors" .. B&B score
https://www.amazon.com/Dying-Whiteness-Politics-Resentment-H...
The correlation can be meaningful in and of itself.
And a link to the paper ("Political environment and mortality rates in the United States, 2001-19: population based cross sectional analysis") that the article describes: https://www.bmj.com/content/377/bmj-2021-069308
> There was no single cause of death driving this lethal wedge: The death rate due to all 10 of the most common causes of death has widened between Republican and Democratic areas.
Wealthier people live longer than poor people.
https://www.brookings.edu/blog/the-avenue/2020/11/09/biden-v...
The current republican party provides a hate machine with no actual solutions other than tax cuts for the rich and culture war for the rubes.
All that is left for the Red counties is anger and despair delivered nightly via Fox news and the right wing lie machine.
Doesn't this prove that it is something other than who your county voted for in the last presidential election causing an increase in AAMR?
> Rural Republican counties experienced the highest AAMR and the least improvement
What if living in a rural area is more of a factor than being a "Repulican county"?
This study seems like it is bending over backward to try to tie the risk of death to who you voted for in the presidential election.
The study controlled for that.
>What is perhaps most telling in our study is that while both Black and Hispanic Americans experienced largely similar gains in health regardless of what political environment they lived in, with Black residents of Democratic areas experiencing the greatest reduction in deaths rates of any major racial-ethnic group, the sharpest divide is seen among white Americans. In fact, the fourfold growth in the gap in death rates between white residents of Democratic and Republican areas seems to be driving most of the overall expanding chasm between Democratic and Republican areas.
"The study period covered five presidential elections from 2000 (673 Democratic counties, 132 833 397 population; 2439 Republican counties, n=147 957 141) to 2019 (490 Democratic counties, n=176 971 611; 2622 Republican counties, n=145 413 920) (supplementary tables 1 and 2)."
In his case he was willing to point this discrepancy out, though he immediately blamed the victims.
So if it sounds like it will sort itself out, it may end up doing so on the backs of the least enfranchised.
This example of pseudo logic is very popular in politics because most voters struggle with logic, but love to look smart, so pseudo logic aopeals to them.
I believe it is a benefit as a matter of faith, but I couldn't prove it to a skeptical person.
