Let me pull out good old reliable "interesting if true"

[james_davis_nicoll]

Voters in Conservative and NDP ridings die younger, study suggests

Comments

[dewline]

Okay, that is...worrying. To put it mildly.

[glaurung]

Translation: rural areas (conservative voters) and marginalized populations (NDP voters) have worse health care than the rest of the country. Plus a helping of vaccine denialist wingnuts (PPC voters) dying in larger numbers.

[the_siobhan]

That was very much my take on it.

[james_davis_nicoll]

The only other party I can think of with a long enough track record for this study are the BQ. I wonder what their numbers look like?

[petrea_mitchell]

The thing I am looking for on this topic, because there are similar correlations between life expectancy and politics in the US, is, do the factors leading to lower expectancy manifest before or after a political shift? Haven't found a study dealing with that yet. Right-wingers who cut health care can certainly cause lower life expectancy, but if immiserated populations are more likely to swing right, that is something that needs its own sort of attention.

[graydon]

Change is risk.

People who are in marginal circumstances or people who have substantial incumbency (= all change is going to make something worse for them) have a common preference for no change, because, by expectation, all change is bad. (All change will result in their circumstances worsening.)

Positive change is the sort of thing the young and the have-a-surplus-but-not-incumbent believe in. (One reason for post Reagan housing policy ("your house is your only real asset/only means of saving that outperforms inflation") is to make sure the mass of have-a-(modest)-surplus have a strong-self-interest reason to support anti-urban repressive policies generally.

So that's one factor.

The other factor is that "honest work" tends to kill you much more than an office job will, in a whole lot of ways.

[beatrice_otter]

I once saw a study that looked at relative income and live expectancy in Republican-controlled areas vs. Democrat-controlled areas. And the thing they found that shocked them was that everyone had a lower life expectancy in heavily Republican states. That is, if you compared people with others of similar socioeconomic backgrounds in Democratic states, they alwayshad a lower life expectancy. It's not surprising that a poor people in a Republican-controlled state would die younger than poor people in a Democratic-controlled state. But it's very surprising that rich people in Republican states have a shorter life expectancy than rich people in Democratic states. The gap is smaller! but still there. And rich people can afford good healthcare no matter where they are; they can also afford not to live near environmental disasters. The people who ran the study had no clue what the factors were, but hadn't managed to come up with the funding to do a follow-up study to try and figure out why.

[graydon]

Stress shortens your life.

The more cosmopolitan an area is, which is more or less "the more people don't much care what you do so long as you keep certain overt minimal bounds of conduct", the lower stress it is.

Having to keep up with the Joneses and present whatever is currently fashionable and currently proper is not low stress.

[thewayne]

That was my thought. Too much hatred and bile, they can't let it go.