How the GOP is killing (Yes, literally) America

This is not hyperbole. The Republican party literally is killing Americans.

Column: America’s decline in life expectancy speaks volumes about our problems
U.S. average life expectancies are lowest in the Southeast, highest on the West Coast and the Northeast. But why?(Jeremy Ney / American Inequality), BY MICHAEL HILTZIK, BUSINESS COLUMNIST, APRIL 5, 2023 5 AM PT

Years of widening economic inequality, compounded by the pandemic and political storm and stress, have given Americans the impression that the country is on the wrong track. Now there’s empirical data to show just how far the country has run off the rails: Life expectancies have been falling.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported last year that life expectancy at birth fell in 2021 to its lowest level since 1996, a decline of nearly a year on average from 2020. That was after a decline by 1.8 years from 2019 to 2020, producing the worst two-year decline since 1921-23.

These figures open a window on a set of pathologies unique to America among developed countries.

America is seeing the greatest gap in life expectancy across regions in the last 40 years.

COVID-19 is the most obvious and convenient culprit, both for the absolute decline in life expectancy and the divergence between the experiences of the U.S. and its economic peers.

Most developed countries have begun to recover the longevity losses they experienced during the pandemic; thus far, there’s scant evidence that the U.S. is following the trend.

The U.S. suffered a greater rise in mortality and premature deaths than its peer countries during the pandemic years of 2019-21, according to the Peterson-Kaiser Family Foundation Health System Tracker.

Remember how initially President Donald Trump denied the severity of COVID, and said it would “just go away.” He lied. It didn’t.

His public attitude led to Republicans refusing masks, refusing vaccination, chasing fake cures like  hydroxychloroquine, and foolishly gathering in crowds that caused the spread of the infection.

Loyalty to Trump over America demanded a cavalier attitude about contagion and healthcare.

“COVID-19 has erased two decades of life expectancy growth in the U.S., whereas the average life expectancy for comparable countries has decreased only marginally, to 2018 levels,” the Health System Tracker found.

That may not be surprising. Few developed countries other than the U.S. turned COVID and anti-pandemic options into political issues, converting such proven treatments as vaccines into partisan litmus tests.

Hundreds of thousands (!) of Americans died needlessly because of Trump’s lies and the Republican party’s obsequence.

Even now, in 2023, more than 90,000 Americans per year die from COVID. The vast majority of deaths  could have been prevented by vaccination.

The GOP ignored warnings from legitimate sources like Dr. Anthony Fauci, who ironically, now is being vilified for not claiming the COVID virus came from a Chinese lab.

Blaming the Chinese for all our ills is a familiar Trumpian coverup tactic. 

Rather than blaming Trump for his role in causing the lethal spread of COVID, the GOP blames Fauci, who repeatedly warned about the dangers of the disease. Such is the GOP mentality.

But COVID is far from the only explanation for America’s dismal trend line.

The pandemic accounted for about half the decline in life expectancy, according to the CDC. “Unintentional injuries,” a category that includes drug overdoses, contributed an additional 16%, followed by heart disease (4.1%), chronic liver disease and cirrhosis (3%) and suicide (2.1%).

Those factors are connected to economic policies and systems, development agendas, social norms, social policies, racism, climate change and political systems.

All of the above are denied and/or exacerbated by the Republican party.

The GOP is the party that wishes to cut Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security benefits, increase FICA taxes on salaried workers, eliminate the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare), reduce the Child Tax Credit, cut the SNAP (food stamp) program, reduce unemployment compensation.

As an overall goal, the GOP does everything possible to make the poor poorer and the rich richer.

The GOP values dollars over human life, so any Democratic effort to reduce air or water pollution, increase benefits to the poor, or to reduce gun violence, is met by GOP resistance.

Americans with the shortest life expectancies “tend to have the most poverty, face the most food insecurity, and have less or no access to healthcare,” Robert H. Shmerling of Harvard Medical School wrote in October.

“Additionally, groups with lower life expectancy tend to have higher-risk jobs that can’t be performed virtually, live in more crowded settings, and have less access to vaccination, which increases the risk of becoming sick with or dying of COVID-19.”

The most important governing factor is economics,observes Jeremy Ney, an expert in graphically displaying social and economic disparities.

“There’s a really strong relationship between life expectancy and income,” Ney told me. “Income is tied in with a lot of other things, like your ability to afford healthcare, your housing security, your distance from a toxic chemical site, things like that.”

“America is seeing the greatest gap in life expectancy across regions in the last 40 years,” Ney says.

America’s life expectancy is falling behind its international peers, including all high-income countries and Japan.  China’s life expectancy outstripped the U.S. in 2020.

That tells only part of the story. The lowest average life expectancies are seen in the states of the Southeast (the so-called “red states): South Carolina, Oklahoma, Arkansas, Tennessee, Kentucky, Alabama, Louisiana, West Virginia and Mississippi all had average life expectancies from birth of less than 75 years. 

The highest life expectancies were generally in states on the West Coast, the northern Midwest and the Northeast. Hawaii ranks first at 80.7, followed by Washington, Minnesota, California, New Hampshire and Massachusetts, all with average life expectancies of 79 or higher.

These geographical disparities aren’t artifacts of pure geography or demographics; they’re the consequences of policy decisions at the state level.