Photo: Jeffrey St. Clair.
When we look at data on life expectancy, that seems like a reasonable question to ask. We can argue over the causes and mechanisms, but it is an undeniable fact that people in states that are controlled by Republicans have much shorter life expectancies than people who live in states controlled by Democrats.
To make the story more interesting, I included some international comparisons.
The first thing I should point out is that the international data are not entirely comparable to the data on life expectancies in US states. The international data are taken from the Worldometer, which in turn comes from the United Nations. The state data are from the Centers for Disease Control (CDC). The US average is about two years higher in the Worldometer data than in the average in the CDC data, so it would be appropriate to add around two years to the state data to make an apples-to-apples comparison.
Nonetheless, the international data are still striking. Even adding two years to the state data, life expectancy in Hawaii, our best performing state, would still be well below life expectancy in Japan, South Korea, Australia, Italy, France, Spain, and even Canada.
The story gets worse as we go down the list. Adding two years to life expectancy in Florida still leaves it below Albania and Costa Rica. Texas is neck and neck with China. Even adding two years to the CDC estimate, Indiana and South Carolina are slightly below Hungary. Kentucky is tied with Mexico and only slightly above Bangladesh. The bottom two, Mississippi and West Virginia, can still boast about being somewhat ahead of Russia and India.
The domestic comparisons are also striking. The top five states are all solidly Democratic. Utah is the only Republican state to break the top 10 at number eight. Two others, Idaho and Nebraska, crack the top 15. The Republican giants, Florida and Texas, rank 19 and 27, respectively.
Just as Democratic states dominate the top 10, Republican states own 9 of the bottom 10 positions. Only Democratic New Mexico, at number 43, makes it into the bottom 10.
But beyond the rankings, these numbers are a really big deal in terms of people’s health and lives. A person living in Hawaii can expect to live almost 8 years longer than a person living in West Virginia. Even moving away a few notches from the extremes, a person living in California can expect to live 5.5 years longer than a person living in Tennessee.
These are enormous differences that really matter in people’s lives, literally. There is a long list of explanations for these gaps, which I am certainly not sufficiently knowledgeable about to get into. But I can look at outcomes, and those are not good.
Can we blame Republican policies? When you have states in the deep South that have been controlled by Republicans for decades, and before that Democrats, who had the same political views as today’s Republicans, it seems fair. If the story was reversed, Fox News would be screaming endlessly about the short life expectancies in Democratic states.
The relevant factors clearly are a result of long historical processes, but these gaps have been there a long time. I first noticed this picture when I was in college almost 50 years ago. The story I was willing to believe was that the South had still not recovered from the Civil War, even though that was more than one hundred years in the distance at that point.
It is now 50 years later. China went from being a poor developing country to the world’s largest economy in that time. South Korea went from having one of the lowest living standards in the world to European standards of living in 50 years. At this point, it’s pretty hard to blame a war that ended 160 years ago. It looks like the bad policies pursued by Republican states is costing their people years of life.
This first appeared on Dean Baker’s Beat the Press blog.
