Science Denial Killing MAGA

Not fast enough to head off climate change, but nevertheless satisfying.
Judge me if you will.

Nature -The political polarization of health outcomes in the USA:

Abstract:

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.
–

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.

We suggest that these growing health gaps are consistent with a mechanism of politically rooted changes in engagement with the health system. Using a large public opinion survey, we find that people on the right, particularly Trump voters and Republicans, express less trust in their personal doctor and are less willing to seek care for non-COVID-19-related health problems^18,19. We also find that people on the right with chronic illnesses are more sceptical than people on the left that medicines to treat those illnesses are safe and effective. This political divide in consumption of care may sustain or deepen the health divide that has emerged in recent decades. However, both these findings and those on health outcomes are purely descriptive; more work is needed to uncover causal relationships.

Our findings raise serious concerns about the equity of health outcomes between Americans of different political backgrounds: conservatives are becoming a less healthy population, and their growing disinclination towards seeking and following medical advice means that these differences may be difficult to address. Although many institutions have lost the trust of Americans in recent decades, the case of medicine is a particularly stark illustration of the consequences that can follow when politics leads people to divest from institutions that promote their welfare.

Daily Kos:

The authors identify two possible causes for the recent disparity. First, less healthy people have increasingly found their way into the conservative side of the aisle. That makes sense, given how the right responded when former first lady Michelle Obama suggested that maybe children should eat a vegetable now and then. You’ll pry their Arby’s from their cold, dead hands. Literally.

But that’s only half the story. The other half is even more disturbing: Conservative politics itself may now be a health risk.

The authors frame political belief as a possible “social determinant of health,” alongside things like income, education, geography, and access to care. In plain English: Your politics may now help predict whether you get treated, whether you listen to your doctor, whether you trust medicine, and ultimately whether you live longer.

That’s what we saw during the COVID pandemic, when conservatives suddenly decided science was suspect and fell for hucksters like Robert F. Kennedy Jr. But the paper makes clear this problem goes well beyond COVID-19 vaccines.