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Conservative Policies are Killing Americans and Shortening Life Expectancy in the US
https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2021/02/are-conservative-policies-killing-us/In 2013, a research team comprised of some of the nation’s top epidemiologists and demographers compared the health of Americans with the health of people in other high-income nations. They summarized their findings in the report’s title: “US Health in International Perspective: Shorter Lives, Poorer Health.”
Compared to 16 other nations, the United States ranked dead last in life expectancy for males and second-to-last for females. Beyond that, the nation ranked at or near the bottom in nine broad areas, including injuries and homicides, drug-related deaths, heart disease, and diabetes. Lung disease was both more common and more deadly in the US than in most of the comparison countries, while older adults were more likely to have arthritis than people in the United Kingdom, Europe, and Japan. The US surpassed all other nations in its rate of infant death. It had the highest rate of new AIDS cases. American young people were more likely than their international peers to die in traffic accidents.
. . .
the US had been losing ground on life expectancy, relative to other countries, for decades. The disparity had been attributed to America’s high poverty rate and racial inequality. But that reasoning became more complicated when a research team stumbled upon the fact that white Americans are significantly less healthy than the British. “It was a bit of a big shock,” Michael Marmot, a professor of epidemiology and public health at University College London who led the research, said in an NPR interview at the time. “I just didn’t imagine we’d find it consistently across the board, with worse health in the United States compared with England.”
. . .
The researchers based their work on a dataset created by political scientist Jacob Grumbach to document policy polarization across the states. Grumbach used an established system to score 135 policies in 16 domains—including abortion, civil rights and liberties, education, gun control, immigration, and taxes—on a conservative-to-liberal continuum for every year between 1970 and 2014. Viewed together over time, the data show how individual states became more conservative or liberal during the 45-year study period.
Montez and her colleagues—including Woolf, chair of the panel behind Shorter Lives—merged the state policy data with life expectancy data for each of the 45 years to see whether there was any association. Their finding: States that implemented more conservative policies were more likely to experience a reduction in life expectancy.
Compared to 16 other nations, the United States ranked dead last in life expectancy for males and second-to-last for females. Beyond that, the nation ranked at or near the bottom in nine broad areas, including injuries and homicides, drug-related deaths, heart disease, and diabetes. Lung disease was both more common and more deadly in the US than in most of the comparison countries, while older adults were more likely to have arthritis than people in the United Kingdom, Europe, and Japan. The US surpassed all other nations in its rate of infant death. It had the highest rate of new AIDS cases. American young people were more likely than their international peers to die in traffic accidents.
. . .
the US had been losing ground on life expectancy, relative to other countries, for decades. The disparity had been attributed to America’s high poverty rate and racial inequality. But that reasoning became more complicated when a research team stumbled upon the fact that white Americans are significantly less healthy than the British. “It was a bit of a big shock,” Michael Marmot, a professor of epidemiology and public health at University College London who led the research, said in an NPR interview at the time. “I just didn’t imagine we’d find it consistently across the board, with worse health in the United States compared with England.”
. . .
The researchers based their work on a dataset created by political scientist Jacob Grumbach to document policy polarization across the states. Grumbach used an established system to score 135 policies in 16 domains—including abortion, civil rights and liberties, education, gun control, immigration, and taxes—on a conservative-to-liberal continuum for every year between 1970 and 2014. Viewed together over time, the data show how individual states became more conservative or liberal during the 45-year study period.
Montez and her colleagues—including Woolf, chair of the panel behind Shorter Lives—merged the state policy data with life expectancy data for each of the 45 years to see whether there was any association. Their finding: States that implemented more conservative policies were more likely to experience a reduction in life expectancy.
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Continue to vote for Colonel Sanders!
