A study published on Wednesday in the scientific journal PLOS One found that Americans live longer in states with liberal policies.
Researchers analyzed working-age mortality rates from 1999 to 2019 among adults aged 25 to 64 and merged that data with annual state-level data on eight policy domains relating to criminal justice, marijuana, the environment, gun safety, health and welfare, private labor, economic taxes, and tobacco taxes. The study did not record how COVID-19 deaths vary between liberal and conservative states.
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Each domain was scored on a 0–1 continuum, where more conservative policies have a maximum score of 0 and more liberal, 1. Policies were considered liberal if they expand state power for economic regulation and redistribution, protect the rights of marginalized groups and restrict state power to punish deviant behavior. Policies that do the opposite were considered to be conservative.
What researchers found was that liberal policies were associated with lower deaths among people aged 25 to 64.
Simulation found that if all states had switched to fully liberal policies, then 171,030 lives would have been saved in 2019. On the other hand, an additional 217,635 lives would have been lost if all states adopted conservative policies.
More conservative marijuana policies and more liberal policies on the environment, gun safety, labor, economic taxes, and tobacco taxes were associated with lower mortality in that state.
Researchers also found “especially strong associations” between:
- Gun safety and suicide mortality among men
- Labor and alcohol-induced mortality
- Both economic taxes and tobacco taxes and cardiovascular disease mortality.
“We 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 Darrell Gaskin, a health economist at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.
Researchers fear this divide will be exacerbated by the hyperpartisanship of the last few years.
“These alternative approaches to public policy has various benefits and harms, and those differ based on which interested group you represent,” said Dr. Steven Woolf, director emeritus of the Center on Society and Health at Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond. “We can make an intentional choice that we’re willing to live shorter lives in order to protect other benefits from those policies, but it should be an informed decision.”