Right wing policies cost lives

  According to peer-reviewed research published in PLOS ONE, working-age mortality rates have been rising for decades across the United States, but premature deaths are more pronounced in states where "conservative" policies predominate and less common in states that have adopted more "liberal" policies.

Policies that "expand state power for economic regulation and redistribution, protect the rights of marginalized groups, or restrict state power to punish deviant behavior" were defined by the study's authors as "liberal," while those with opposite aims were deemed "conservative."

The authors found that liberal policies were associated with fewer early deaths among 25- to 64-year-olds between 1999 and 2019.

"Changing all policy domains in all states to a fully liberal orientation might have saved 171,030 lives in 2019," the researchers estimate, "while changing them to a fully conservative orientation might have cost 217,635 lives."

Study co-author Dr. Steven Woolf, director emeritus of the Center on Society and Health at Virginia Commonwealth University, explained,:"As an academic who does scientific research, I studiously avoided talking about politics in my professional work... But the data are pointing us to that as a determinant of health."

If a state policymaker were to say to me, 'it's unfair to criticize my state because I have a low-educated, low-income population,' I would ask them, 'why do you have a low-educated, low-income population?'" lead study author Jennifer Karas Montez, a professor of sociology at Syracuse University, pointed out. "It's because of your policy environment."

Darrell Gaskin, a health economist at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, said that some people "like to think about (working-age mortality) as failures of individuals, that they eat too much or use drugs, but that's all in context."

"If we don't have the proper regulations in place to protect people, then what happens is that they could be exploited," said Gaskin. "We always get the promise from conservative states that we're going to cut your taxes and regulation and make the environment better for business, and it comes with a cost."

With their efforts to impose anti-union "right-to-work" laws, ban abortions, and curtail Medicaid, and their insistence on ignoring gun violence and the life-threatening climate crisis, Republicans have firmly established themselves in the camp that is actively increasing premature deaths among the nation's working-age population.

Republican Policies Are Killing Americans: Study (commondreams.org)