WAPO: Living in red America can be life-threatenin
Post# of 123490
Steven H. Woolf, a professor at Virginia Commonwealth University, writes in the Journal of American Medicine: “Disparities in health across the 50 states are growing, a trend that began in the 1990s. For example, in 1990, life expectancy in New York was lower than in Oklahoma, but the trajectories separated sharply in the 1990s and, by 2016, New York ranked third in life expectancy, whereas Oklahoma ranked 45th.” Moreover, “the widening gap cannot be explained by changes in the racial and ethnic composition of states, because the same trend occurred within racial and ethnic groups.”
Instead, Woolf says the politics of red states is killing their residents. “Conservative governors increasingly use preemption, the authority to override local governments, to block liberal health policies (e.g., indoor smoking bans),” he notes. “States have preempted local regulations on nutrition (e.g., menu labeling, food deserts) and, as of 2013, 45 states had enacted statutes to limit local firearm regulations.”
...
Eight of the 10 states with the highest covid death rates adjusted for age have Republican governors: Mississippi, Oklahoma, Alabama, Texas, Tennessee, Arizona, Arkansas and Indiana. (Nevada and Kentucky are the exceptions, coming in 6th and 10th, respectively.)
Similarly, nine of the 10 states with the worst vaccination rates — Wyoming, Mississippi, Louisiana, Idaho, Indiana, Tennessee, Alabama, Ohio, West Virginia and North Dakota — have GOP governors. Of these, only Louisiana is led by a Democrat, and all of them voted for defeated former president Donald Trump in both 2016 and 2020.
The same divergence between red and blue states exists with respect to murder rates, as well. The center-left think tank Third Way reports: “In 2020, per capita murder rates were 40% higher in states won by Donald Trump than those won by Joe Biden.” Even more dramatically, “8 of the 10 states with the highest murder rates in 2020 voted for the Republican presidential nominee in every election this century.”
OpEd by Jennifer Rubin
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/...reatening/