Public health disparities provide an important lens for understanding social and political change in the USA. Using individual-level medical data and death records, this study shows that conservative Americans experienced worsening health and higher mortality than liberals during the 2010s. Here we find evidence consistent with two potential mechanisms. First, demographic realignment within political coalitions brought less healthy individuals into the conservative camp. Yet by the 2020s, demographic change, public policy and COVID-19 do not fully account for the widening gap in mortality rates. Public opinion data are consistent with a second mechanism: declining trust in medical professionals among right-leaning individuals, including lower willingness to seek care, follow clinical advice or believe in medication effectiveness, even for issues unrelated to COVID-19. These patterns suggest that growing ideological divides in health behaviours are leaving conservative Americans increasingly vulnerable to preventable health risks. Using individual-level medical data and death records, this study finds that conservatives in the USA experienced worse health and higher mortality than liberals during the 2010s. No significant gaps in biomarkers or mortality were present before the 2010s.
Oh man, I wish you had actually read the article and seen how they already factored that in, because nothing you wrote is relevant to the actual study referenced here.
But this is the internet, where you don’t have to read a thing in order to mansplain that thing back to everyone else.
The salient point you missed: This is a study of ONE GROUP OF PEOPLE OVER TIME.
"We find that conservative Americans in this cohort, who were about as healthy as liberals in the early 2010s, experienced worsening health through the 2010s and higher mortality in the early 2020s. Roughly half of this new health gap is due to people changing their ideology over time, with new entrants to the conservative coalition being less healthy than new liberals. But another sizeable share is due to people who were already liberal or conservative diverging more in health over time. Changes in the socio-economics of the liberal and conservative coalitions—including education, income and insurance status—contribute to both processes.
"By the 2020s, conservatives were dying at significantly higher rates than liberals, with the gap concentrated in internal causes (for example, heart disease, cancer and stroke). The divide since 2020 is substantial: while only 0.2% of ‘very liberal’ respondents died of internal causes between 2020 and 2022, the probability for people who identified as ‘very conservative’ was 1.14 percentage points higher (P = 0.021; 95% confidence interval (CI), (0.18, 2.11)).
“This gap is not limited to deaths from COVID-19 and is not reducible to demographic or geographic differences between the groups, nor is it a pure function of ageing: previous cohorts’ death patterns in older data did not show a similar correlation between health and ideology before 2010.”
Oh man, I wish you had actually read the article and seen how they already factored that in, because nothing you wrote is relevant to the actual study referenced here.
But this is the internet, where you don’t have to read a thing in order to mansplain that thing back to everyone else.
The salient point you missed: This is a study of ONE GROUP OF PEOPLE OVER TIME.
"We find that conservative Americans in this cohort, who were about as healthy as liberals in the early 2010s, experienced worsening health through the 2010s and higher mortality in the early 2020s. Roughly half of this new health gap is due to people changing their ideology over time, with new entrants to the conservative coalition being less healthy than new liberals. But another sizeable share is due to people who were already liberal or conservative diverging more in health over time. Changes in the socio-economics of the liberal and conservative coalitions—including education, income and insurance status—contribute to both processes.
"By the 2020s, conservatives were dying at significantly higher rates than liberals, with the gap concentrated in internal causes (for example, heart disease, cancer and stroke). The divide since 2020 is substantial: while only 0.2% of ‘very liberal’ respondents died of internal causes between 2020 and 2022, the probability for people who identified as ‘very conservative’ was 1.14 percentage points higher (P = 0.021; 95% confidence interval (CI), (0.18, 2.11)).
“This gap is not limited to deaths from COVID-19 and is not reducible to demographic or geographic differences between the groups, nor is it a pure function of ageing: previous cohorts’ death patterns in older data did not show a similar correlation between health and ideology before 2010.”
Next time, read the fucking article first.