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Growing ‘mortality gap’ detected between Democratic and Republican counties
public news time ^ | June 7, 2022

Posted on 06/07/2022 5:50:16 PM PDT by American Number 181269513

A new study highlights how closely connected politics and health outcomes have grown over time. Investigators from Brigham and Women’s Hospital examined mortality rates and federal and state election data for all counties in the U.S. from 2001 to 2019. The team found what they call a “mortality gap”—a widening difference between age-adjusted death rates in counties that had voted for a Democrat or a Republican in previous presidential and governor elections. The team found that mortality rates decreased by 22 percent in Democratic counties but by only 11 percent in Republican counties. The mortality gap rose across top disease areas, including heart disease and cancer, and the mortality gap between white residents in Democratic versus Republican counties increased nearly fourfold during the study period. Results are published in the British Medical Journal.

“In an ideal world, politics and health would be independent of each other and it wouldn’t matter whether one lives in an area that voted for one party or another,” said corresponding author Haider Warraich, MD, of the Division of Cardiovascular Medicine at the Brigham. “But that is no longer the case. From our data, we can see that the risk of premature death is higher for people living in a county that voted Republican.”

Warraich and colleagues used data from the Wide-ranging OnLine Data for Epidemiologic Research (CDC WONDER) database and the MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) Election Data and Science Laboratory. They classified counties as Democratic or Republican based on the way the county had voted in the previous presidential election and adjusted for age when calculating mortality rates.

Overall, the team found that mortality rates in Democratic counties dropped from 850 deaths per 100,000 people to 664 (22 percent), but in Republican counties, mortality rates declined from 867 to 771 (11 percent). When the team analyzed by race, they found that there was little gap between the improvements in mortality rates that Black and Hispanic Americans experienced in Democratic and Republican counties. But among white Americans, the gap between people living in Democratic versus Republican counties was substantial.

The mortality gap remained consistent when the researchers looked only at counties that had voted Republican or Democratic in every presidential election year studied and when they looked at gubernatorial elections. Democratic counties experienced greater reductions in mortality rates across most common causes of death, including heart disease, cancer, chronic lower respiratory tract diseases, diabetes, influenza and pneumonia, and kidney disease.

The authors note that the widening gap in death rates may reflect the influence of politics on health policies. One of the inflection points detected in the study corresponds to the Affordable Care Act (ACA), which was passed in 2010. More Democratic states than Republican states adopted Medicaid expansion under the ACA, which expanded health insurance coverage to people on a low income.

The study detects an association between political environment and mortality but does not definitively determine the direction of the association or the specific factors that may explain the link between the two. The authors did not study the effect of flipping political environments—that is, counties that switched from voting Democratic or Republican to voting for the other party—on health outcomes, which could be an area of future study. The study period ended in 2019, before the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, which may have had an even more profound impact on the mortality gap.

“Our study suggests that the mortality gap is a modern phenomenon, not an inevitability,” said Warraich. “At the start of our study, we saw little difference in mortality rates in Democratic and Republican counties. We hope that our findings will open people’s eyes and show the real effect that politics and health policy can have on people’s lives.”


TOPICS: News/Current Events; Politics/Elections
KEYWORDS: democrat; mortalityrate; republican
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“But that is no longer the case. From our data, we can see that the risk of premature death is higher for people living in a county that voted Republican.”

A liberal hospital (Brigham and Women’s Hospital ) is fed data from a left leaning MIT and a corrupt CDC. The result, “Vote Democarat and live longer”.

This biased study from Brigham and Women’s Hospital in New England was published in the British Medical Journal. Perhaps the New England Journal Of Medicine rejected it.

1 posted on 06/07/2022 5:50:16 PM PDT by American Number 181269513
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To: American Number 181269513

They had their conclusion already. Just needed to cherry pick data to fit it.


2 posted on 06/07/2022 5:56:51 PM PDT by kb2614 (Cheer up, for the worst is yet to come!)
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To: American Number 181269513

Which counties got the “special” batches of vaccine?


3 posted on 06/07/2022 5:56:54 PM PDT by ClearCase_guy (I don't want to be part of a union of 50 states. We tried that. It doesn't work.)
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To: American Number 181269513
...the risk of premature death is higher for people living in a county that voted Republican.

Betcha that's not true if you include premature death by bullet.

4 posted on 06/07/2022 5:58:26 PM PDT by econjack (I'm not bossy. I just know what you should be doing.)
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To: kb2614

It is not that surprising. The main correlations might be to incomes, smoking, and eating red meat. Not to political parties.


5 posted on 06/07/2022 6:00:04 PM PDT by nwrep
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To: American Number 181269513

ACA took health care resources from rural areas and gave it to urban areas.

Rural areas got opioid prescriptions urban areas got medical treatments.

It’s a lived out threat to harm red counties.


6 posted on 06/07/2022 6:05:48 PM PDT by lonestar67 (America is exceptional)
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To: American Number 181269513

The study needs much more in the way of apples and oranges controls.

There are major differences in populations, in age structure, between counties and states. Southern (Republican) states get floods of retirees from Democrat states, where they, naturally, die. That has nothing to do with medical care.

Also, the vast preponderance of mortality occurs among those over 65. Not a lot of younger people die, vs the aged. Obamacare has nothing to do with the aged, as they are covered by Medicare, which is uniform across states, as a Federal benefit. That speculation needs to be much more rigorously tested.


7 posted on 06/07/2022 6:07:59 PM PDT by buwaya (Strategic imperatives )
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To: nwrep

I am going to bet it has more to do with rural vs urban. The most obvious reason being that medical help is farther away, sometimes much, much farther away. You probably aren’t going to survive a heart attack if you are 90 minutes from the hospital.


8 posted on 06/07/2022 6:12:19 PM PDT by Valpal1 (Not even the police are safe from the police!!!)
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To: American Number 181269513

This reminds me of the book “How to Lie with Statistics”.


9 posted on 06/07/2022 6:16:46 PM PDT by EastTexasTraveler
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To: nwrep

Another factor might be that red counties are more likely to be rural and further away from major medical centers with all of their specialists. When minutes can be the difference between life and death, it makes a difference whether the emergency room is ten minutes away or twenty minutes away.


10 posted on 06/07/2022 6:35:16 PM PDT by Steve_Seattle
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To: American Number 181269513

most Democrats are younger


11 posted on 06/07/2022 6:35:33 PM PDT by TornadoAlley3 ( I'm Proud To Be An Okie From Muskogee)
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To: American Number 181269513

The other possibility is tainted vaxxes sent to highly republican areas and safer ones or saline to democrat ones.


12 posted on 06/07/2022 6:42:51 PM PDT by metmom (...fixing our eyes on Jesus, the Author and Perfecter of our faith….)
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To: nwrep

It’s interesting that they were roughly equal in 2000.
The gap appeared 2001-2019.


13 posted on 06/07/2022 6:49:33 PM PDT by scrabblehack
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To: nwrep

This is nothing but cherry picking statistics. Complete udder bovine nonsense.


14 posted on 06/07/2022 6:55:07 PM PDT by ohioman
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To: American Number 181269513

Meaningless without a median age.


15 posted on 06/07/2022 7:08:46 PM PDT by D Rider ( )
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To: American Number 181269513

More vegans and vegetarians?


16 posted on 06/07/2022 7:17:07 PM PDT by Mathews (It's all gravy, baby!)
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To: Steve_Seattle

And yet another factor is that rural 2-lane roads have a very high accident rate compared to urban roads.

Here in Virginia, they are hilly, windy, and almost never have any shoulders, and many of the intersections don’t provide a very good view of oncoming traffic owing to the fact that they’re in the middle of a curve or they’re not at a 90 degree angle or other piss-poor examples of highway engineering.

Not that most of these roads were actually engineered. The improvements stopped when they got paved.


17 posted on 06/07/2022 7:43:13 PM PDT by brianl703
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To: D Rider

You beat me to it — voting pattern and mortality explain it all.


18 posted on 06/07/2022 7:44:23 PM PDT by Chewbarkah
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To: American Number 181269513
Aren't people fleeing from Dem areas to Rep?
Probably mostly older people.

19 posted on 06/07/2022 7:44:58 PM PDT by BitWielder1 (I'd rather have Unequal Wealth than Equal Poverty.)
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To: ohioman
The only way this can be true is the number of people who died during covid when government refused to let doctors treat their patients. A lot of people died needlessly thanks to government interference.
20 posted on 06/07/2022 7:46:13 PM PDT by Rdct29 (Democrats are the new Nazi's. They think they deserve total control over the people)
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