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Wednesday’s Forum
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28 responses to “Wednesday’s Forum”
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The health divide emerged over the last decade and has widened since 2020, according to research that links ideology to outcomes from heart disease, cancer, stroke, and other internal causes…
“2010 is the last year in which we can say fairly clearly that there is not this gap,” Elizabeth Elder, a coauthor of the study, tells Fast Company. “By 2020 we have pretty clear evidence of a gap in which conservatives are less healthy than liberals.”
By 2016, the gap had begun to appear in biomarker measures. By 2020, it was showing up in deaths from causes such as heart disease, cancer, and stroke. Since then, the gap has only widened. Between 2020 and 2022, only 0.2% of “very liberal” respondents died of internal causes, compared with 1.34% of “very conservative” respondents.
The authors argue in the study that the divide cannot be explained away by COVID-19 deaths, demographic differences, geography, or the simple fact that some groups are older than others. Instead, they point to a widening ideological divide in trust toward doctors and the broader medical system.
That crisis of trust accelerated during the COVID-19 pandemic, with fights over masks and vaccines spilling out from social media into everyday life. Now it extends to other health matters, such as taking blood pressure medication or seeing a doctor for chest pains.
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Conservatives and Liberals Have Diverging Health Outcomes. Why? (The Dispatch)
O’Brian and Elder found that in 2008-2009 liberals and conservatives had roughly comparable health outcomes, but by the end of the 2010s, the most conservative individuals had significantly worse health results.
“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 authors wrote. “The divide since 2020 is substantial…”
At first glance, these results align with what’s already known about political and ideological changes over the last 20 years. Wealthier and more educated individuals increasingly shifted to the left, and less wealthy and less educated people shifted to the right—and wealth and education have well-established associations with health outcomes.
…Elder and O’Brian found that this coalitional reshuffling doesn’t fully explain the gap. “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,” they explained. “But another sizeable share is due to people who were already liberal or conservative diverging more in health over time.”
…Notably, the results also seemed to align with other studies associating conservatives’ relatively higher rates of marriage and religiosity with better health. But that association seems to have prevented conservatives from falling even further behind, rather than surpassing, liberals. “The gap between liberals and conservatives would have grown more if not for conservatives’ relative gains on two health-promoting dimensions: marriage and religiosity,” Elder and O’Brian wrote.
There’s a similar unexplained gap in the death statistics that emerged beginning in 2020. “We find that even once we control for as many things as we can, like education and race and income and public health quality in the place where one lives, and even when we look within respondents in the same county, and controlling for all those other demographics, the conservatives are still more likely to die than the liberals, including [from] non-COVID-19 related causes,” Elder told The Dispatch. “It’s always possible that there’s something we’re not measuring that is actually explaining this relationship between ideology and death, but all the things that we can control for don’t explain the difference.”
O’Brian and Elder both emphasized throughout the paper and in their conversations with The Dispatch that while the data show a clear association between ideological orientation and health and mortality, it does not prove a causal relationship. However, the researchers looked beyond the Add Health data to suggest a potential mechanism that could account for some of the gap: political leanings influencing people’s engagement with health care and consequently their health outcomes. “This notion has been readily applied to COVID-19-related healthcare (for example, vaccines) and outcomes (for example, infection and death rates),” they wrote. “But what if those on the political right are less likely to visit, trust and follow the advice of their doctor on health matters entirely unrelated to COVID-19?”
The pair conducted a large survey of U.S. adults in 2024 that asked people about ideological, partisan, and electoral associations (e.g., whether they were conservative, Republican, and/or Trump voters) as well as their engagement with health care providers, including emergency room doctors and their primary care physicians…
The liberal and conservative respondents reported visiting their primary care physician (PCP) in the previous year at roughly the same rate, though Republicans and Trump voters were less likely to have seen their doctor. Conservatives, Republicans, and Trump voters all reported significantly lower trust in their doctors and less willingness to follow their guidance.
Tea Partyism and the paranoid style in politics may be deadly.
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Zelensky had the best zinger yet…via the Bulwark’s BlueSky feed:
Trump: “One of the things I talked to [Putin] about was ‘Where would you want to meet?’ And he said ‘Ideally in Moscow.’ I said ‘You’re not going to meet in Moscow.’…Would you go to Moscow?”
Zelensky: “It’s difficult. There are a lot of Ukrainian drones there.”
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I am getting used to the new page look, but I wish it continued to reflect the number of comments. I tend to check in a few times a day and like being able to see if there has been any substantial activity on certain threads without having to go through the article and existing thread each time to check.
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The Ukrainians have seriously fucked Russia up.
Half their refining capability is off-line – the Ukes have struck on the far side of the Urals, even the Nazis didn’t manage that. That means their reach now extends over all but the farther reaches of Siberia – even the Murmansk base and the Arctic oil fields are in range.
Gas station wait times in Crimea measured in days not hours. Eight tankers in the Sea of Azov hit, there’ll be more tonight. Food running low in Crimea as well, and power stations hit hourly. Thousands of cars lined up to escape over the Kerch bridge.
Russia’s stock market continues a months’ long plunge as bond yields shrug off recent attempts at rescue and head upward. They’re broke, and they have nothing left to sell.
They are so screwed even Trump is abandoning them. Time for Putin to threaten nukes again.
Meanwhile, the Strait of Hormuz appears to be. . . clopen? Our idiot president is tweeting ‘boom!’ AI art and declaring his ‘deal’ dead.
Orban, Netanyahu, Farage, Putin, Trump, was it only a few months ago we were watching the rise of the fascist tough guys?
Interesting times.
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What was the handle of the guy who was a frequent poster here, and absolutely obsessed with how women were always making up stories about rape and sexual assault? It got to the point that he would bring up ten and twenty year old cases that had absolutely nothing to do with the topic under discussion. “EV’s are too expensive.”
“Yeah, well the same people who say that are the ones who railroaded the Duke Lacrosse team!” -
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A few days ago The Contrarian had a piece in their substack about reforming the (late) Supreme Court.
There’s a lot of the usual, like term limits and expanding the court. But there’s also this:
That is returning the Supreme Court to the original jurisdiction the Framers established. They did not see the Supreme Court as all-powerful, arrogating to itself key legislative powers and making Congress an inferior branch. That original jurisdiction was established to enable the Supreme Court to settle controversies between states, between citizens of different states, and between states and foreign entities or persons.
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Congress can take away the Supreme Court’s appellate authority in whatever areas it wants, except the narrow ones defining original jurisdiction. … Congress can create a new appellate court to handle those areas, perhaps one consisting of the chief judges of all the circuits. And Congress needs to mandate a stiff, meaningful code of ethics for the Supreme Court, including creating an Independent office consisting of former judges and legal ethics experts who would recommend sanctions for violations, with the judicial conference required to explain in detail if the recommendations are rejected.I haven’t come across any similar proposal elsewhere. It’s a radical solution. Given the US legal system runs as much on precedent as on law, there are 200+ years of precedent for the (late) Supreme Court as the ultimate court of appeals. Once it rules, you need to either legislate or amend the constitution to overturn their ruling.
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@dazedandconfused Also: if you click on the “Open Forum” tag at the author box above it will take you to Fora aplenty!
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In his subtsack today, Paul Krugman talks about the great European de-Americanization taking place right now.
I’ve been hearing a lot about this in Youtube channels. It hasn’t been much in the news.
It’s not all of Europe, and even then it’s at the government level rather then the individual one. People will keep using Windows and Mac, not Linux. Ditto for most other tech services and even data mining apps. There’s a coming office software suite made in the EU. that might gain more traction if it does what MS Office does, and it’s cheaper or outright lacks a subscription model (and if it’s compatible with the various MS Office formats).
We’ll see.
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Oh, FFS, just pay up, loser.
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No, he cannot according to Krugman in his substack post today: So this would not fly even in the Trump administration. Even with a supine congress and a permissive Supreme Court this is not going to happen. Also Spain is part of the European Union. So this is like Europe declaring “we’re cutting off all trade with Florida”: they can’t do that. And also, there’s a lot of U.S. business with Spain. In fact, Spain is one of those countries with which we run a trade surplus. So U.S. business would be howling.
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