Opinion: A growing gap in premature deaths along party lines underscores the collision of politics and public health
In an ideal world, public health would be independent of politics. Yet recent events in the U.S., such as the Supreme Court’s impending repeal of Roe v. Wade, the spike in gun violence across the country, and the stark partisan divide on the response to the Covid-19 pandemic, are putting public health on a collision course with politics. Although this may seem like a new phenomenon, American politics has been creating a deep fissure in the health of Americans over the past two decades.
I say that based on a comprehensive analysis my colleagues and I performed and published Tuesday in The BMJ. In this study, in which we linked U.S. mortality and election data from 2001 to 2019, people in counties that voted for Republican presidential candidates were more like to die prematurely than those in counties that voted for Democratic candidates, and the gap has grown sixfold over the last two decades. We found similar results when we looked only at counties that voted for one party’s candidate throughout that period, as well as when we used state election data for governors.
