Red States Can Be Hazardous To Your Health

 

Headline on the front page of today's print Washington ("Democracy Dies in Darkness") Post (but buried so deeply in the dark as to be undetectable in the online edition):

Red-state politics are shaving years off U.S. lives

The study looks at three side-by-side counties in Ohio, Pennsylvania and New York bordering on Lake Erie.  The findings show that living in Republican- dominated states can be hazardous to your health:

... Americans are more likely to die before age 65 than residents of similar nations, despite living in a country that spends substantially more per person on health care than its peers.

Many of those early deaths can be traced to decisions made years ago by local and state lawmakers over whether to implement cigarette taxes, invest in public health or tighten seat-belt regulations, among other policies, an examination by The Washington Post found. States’ politics — and their resulting policies — are shaving years off American lives.

Ashtabula’s [Ohio] problems stand out compared with two nearby counties — Erie, Pa., and Chautauqua, N.Y. All three communities, which ring picturesque Lake Erie and are a short drive from each other, have struggled economically in recent decades as industrial jobs withered — conditions that contribute toward rising midlife mortality, research shows. None is a success story when it comes to health. But Ashtabula residents are much more likely to die young, especially from smoking, diabetes-related complications or motor vehicle accidents, than people living in its sister counties in Pennsylvania and New York, states that have adopted more stringent public health measures.

That pattern held true during the coronavirus pandemic, when Ashtabula residents died of covid at far higher rates than people in Chautauqua and Erie.  [snip]

Ohio sticks out — for all the wrong reasons. Roughly 1 in 5 Ohioans will die before they turn 65, according to Montez’s analysis using the state’s 2019 death rates. The state, whose legislature has been increasingly dominated by Republicans, has plummeted nationally when it comes to life expectancy rates, moving from middle of the pack to the bottom fifth of states during the last 50 years, The Post found. Ohioans have a similar life expectancy to residents of Slovakia and Ecuador, relatively poor countries...

It's a logical outcome of a social Darwinist/ E. Coli conservative philosophy that encompasses not only decisions on health care (including restricting reproductive freedom for women), but decisions affecting the environment and climate (support for the fossil fuel industry), and the safety of our infrastructure (including rail, bridge and highway, and oil and chemical refineries).  Clearly, it's far more important for states run by the Christofascist party of "small government" (except when it comes to helping out corporations, vested interests, and the wealthiest Americans, that is) to give their citizens the freedom to die sooner than it is to betray their credo of "afflicting the afflicted, and comforting the comfortable."

Much more at the link.