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How politics and how we pay for health care change non-Hispanic white death rates. [1]

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Date: 2022-12-15

Feel free to send this to anyone

I present the graph to the Daily Kos community and anyone else the Daily Kos community would like to send it to on my 80th birthday. I have tried to present our mortality data in a way that easier to understand than general demographic publications.

Here is what I see the graph showing:

First age grouped by how health care is paid for in the United States shows a big difference in how early people die and how it is changing. The age group primarily covered by private health insurance has consistently had increasing death rates. In the United States we have private health insurance as the primary source of health care until people qualify for Medicare under Social Security. However the young have a backup system of state provided health care for most of the uninsured up to age 18. I cannot produce data for insured and uninsured aged 18 through 25 because some get their parents insurance coverage extended if they go to college and I cannot measure that with existing data. Think about this extension of health insurance, the children in families that can afford to send their children to college get them more health insurance. The data for the young are not presented here but generally their trend follows the elderly trend until are 19 or older. In other data I pulled down from CDC it showed that the death rate for all 18 year olds declined by -24.7% while all 30 year olds increased by 39.9% from 1999 to 2019.

Second, politics make a difference, people in Republican voting states have higher death rates than the people in Democratic voting states. Among the middle aged in Democratic voting states their increases in death rates are smaller than the middle aged in Republican voting states. And for those aged 65 through 84, the people in both Democratic and Republican voting states have declining death rates with the Democratic states declining more than the Republican voting states. However, I think this difference in the elderly death rates is not due to differences in health care provided by Medicare, Instead, I think that the private health insurance denies more middle aged care in Republican voting states and while that increases their death rate more, I think it also results in people living long enough to get Medicare in Republican voting states that have more damaged bodies because of care denied when they were under private health insurance. I don’t have any data to show it but I think the elderly damaged by more denied care in their middle aged will die earlier than their age peers who earlier were denied less needed care during.

A third note is that this graph uses each groups 1999 death rate as a starting point but in addition to what this graph shows the age and party differences for that graphs zeros the number of deaths per 100,000 are:

Middle aged Republicans: 383.6

Middle aged Democrats: 326.0

Elderly Republicans: 3936.9

Elderly Democrats: 3734.7

In effect if the lines of data points started earlier, the same trends were going on for several years.

The link to the states grouped by party is: www.dailykos.com/… Even though it is an older post, it is worth reading.

The link t0 get this and other mortality data is: wonder.cdc.gov/… I find it fun to play with.

I will conclude with a hypothetical that this data suggests: What would have changed if the middle aged in Republican voting states had changed like the middle aged in Democratic voting states?

From 1999 through 2019 the non-Hispanic Whites aged 25-64 in Democratic voting states experiences lower death rates than those in Republican voting states. Those living in the Republican voting states experienced 3,121,518 deaths. If they had died at the same rate as those the same ethnicity and age experienced in Democratic voting states that number would have been 2,468,553. That is 652,965 or 20.9% fewer deaths. But numbers need comparisons to make sense. The total number of combat deaths we have experienced since the start of the revolutionary war is estimated at about 666,441.

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[1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2022/12/15/2142000/--How-politics-and-how-we-pay-for-health-care-change-non-Hispanic-white-death-rates

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