REPUBLICANS ARE FAILING TO PROTECT THEIR CONSTITUENTS AND RACISM CONTINUES TO BE A PUBLIC HEALTH THREAT 

Massachusetts-based researchers find 'mortality gap' between Democratic, Republican counties

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  Updated: 6:30 PM EDT Jun 7, 2022

Brigham and Women's Hospital

BOSTON —

Mortality rates in Democratic and Republican counties are growing further apart, according to newly published research conducted by Massachusetts-based investigators.

The team from Brigham and Women's Hospital looked at mortality rates and election data for all U.S. counties from 2001 through 2019. Their results were published in the British Medical Journal.

"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," a hospital spokesperson wrote in a summary of the results.

Using information from databases maintained by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Election Data and Science Laboratory, the team found that mortality rates decreased more in Democratic counties than in Republican counties.

The mortality gap spanned top diseases, including heart disease and cancer.

Mortality rates in Democratic Counties dropped from by 22% between 2001 and 2019, from 850 deaths per 100,000 people to 664. Meanwhile, mortality rates declined 11% in Republican counties, from 867 to 711.

"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."

Additionally, the researchers found that race played a role in the outcomes.

"There was little gap between the improvements in mortality rates that Black and Hispanic Americans experienced in Democratic and Republican counties," the Brigham spokesperson explained. "But among white Americans, the gap between people living in Democratic versus Republican counties was substantial."

In the announcement of their results, the research authors suggested that the widening gap in death rates could be linked to the politics of health policies. They cite as an example the Affordable Care Act, which was passed in 2010 and which led to Medicaid expansion in more Democratic states than Republican states.

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