Republican policies are literally killing Americans | #republicans | #Alabama | #GOP

Working-age mortality rates have been rising for decades across the United States, but premature deaths are more pronounced in states where “conservative” policies predominate and less common in states that have adopted more “liberal” policies, according to peer-reviewed research published in PLOS ONE.

“If we don’t have the proper regulations in place to protect people, then what happens is that they could be exploited.”

Policies that “expand state power for economic regulation and redistribution, protect the rights of marginalized groups, or restrict state power to punish deviant behavior” were defined by the study’s authors as “liberal,” while those with opposite aims were deemed “conservative.”

If you think about it, this only makes sense.  Regulations intended to improve worker and consumer safety, restrict the dumping of toxic chemicals, and restrict pollution do directly impact Americans’ lives. The GOP constantly decrees regulations as “impeding business” but frankly, there are some areas where industry should be impeded, which is where it puts the lives of their workers, consumers and the community at risk.

And yet, there’s more.

For eight policy domains—criminal justice, marijuana, environment, gun safety, health and welfare, private labor, economic taxes, and tobacco taxes—the authors scored state-level measures enacted from 1999 to 2019 on a 0-to-1 continuum, with zero representing the maximum conservative score and one the maximum liberal score.

Using annual data from the National Vital Statistics System, the authors calculated state-level age-adjusted mortality rates during the same time period for deaths from all causes and from cardiovascular disease (CVD), alcohol-induced causes, suicide, and drug poisoning among adults aged 25 to 64.

When they merged the data on working-age mortality with data on state policy contexts, the authors found that liberal policies were associated with fewer early deaths among 25- to 64-year-olds between 1999 and 2019.

“Changing all policy domains in all states to a fully liberal orientation might have saved 171,030 lives in 2019,” the researchers estimate, “while changing them to a fully conservative orientation might have cost 217,635 lives.”

Not that shockingly, implementing policies that are pro-people — actually save people from being injured and killed.  Particularly when those policies related to gun safety and suicide.

Demonstrating how state policy contexts influence individual behaviors associated with premature deaths, researchers observed “especially strong associations… between certain domains and specific causes of death: between the gun safety domain and suicide mortality among men, between the labor domain and alcohol-induced mortality, and between both the economic tax and tobacco tax domains and CVD mortality.”

[…]

Darrell Gaskin, a health economist at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, said that some people “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 Gaskin. “We always get the promise from conservative states that we’re going to cut your taxes and regulation and make the environment better for business, and it comes with a cost.”

From the beginning of this nation, we’ve had a streak where people have been directly exploited and victimized for the profit of others.  Originally, it was called indentured servitude.  Then it changed to racial chattel slavery. After that, it was modified into the sharecropper system where people were essentially indebted for life to the banks and the criminal industrial complex where convicts could be made to work for free.

That same sentiment is at the heart of our corporate culture.  Push the workers until they break.  Never mind the damage to the community from toxic electronic waste. Never mind expanding Medicaid for poor people so they don’t have to wait until they’re from a chronic or critical illness before going to see a doctor.  Never mind the pollution that is pumped into the air and the water. Never mind the risk of an oil spill.  Never mind the fact we have a section of the country that’s literally called “Cancer Alley.” Never mind the risks, there’s money to be made.

And they don’t give a damn who gets hurt in the process.