Conservatives Now Owning The Libs By Dying More
Take that, modern medicine!
For quite some time now, rejecting science and modern medicine has been the hot trend on the Right — something of a shibboleth, if you will. Nothing will lose you street cred faster than believing that vaccines are necessary or that climate change is real, and there’s no better way to gain it than by eating gallons of horse paste with a side of colloidal silver. And besides, what better way is there to piss off all those smug libs than by rejecting sound medical advice in favor of junk science and snake oil?
Well, there is now some quantitative proof of what a fabulous success that has been. A study published in Nature last month found that conservatives are dying at higher rates than are liberals, as opposed to back in 2010 when we all died at more or less the same rate. Curiously, it’s not just COVID-19 deaths, either. Multiple studies have already shown that Republicans were at least 15 percent more likely to die of COVID-19, particularly after the vaccine dropped. What this shows, however, is that they’re more likely to die of every other cause as well.
We have to assume that this is very good news, as far as they are concerned, as it is proof that not only are their compatriots not selling out and secretly taking the advice of their primary care providers (or seeing a PCP, even), but that they are willing to die for the cause.
Via Fast Company:
“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.
The study found that while liberals and conservatives were actually about equally likely to see a primary care provider, conservatives were less likely to trust that doctor’s assessment and follow their advice, particularly after COVID-19. On the other side of things, people on the Left became increasingly more likely to trust their doctors and follow their advice after leaving the office.
Curiously, the study also found that the further left someone is, the more healthy they are likely to be, with those rating themselves as “very liberal” having the lowest mortality rate of all.
“Even once COVID-19 deaths are separated out,” the authors wrote, “liberals, moderates and conservatives were all more likely to die during the 2020–2022 period than the most liberal respondents.”
I mean, I’ve always said that single payer Medicare For All would save lives, but it certainly never occurred to me that simply believing we should have it might have a similar effect.
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I guess if you don’t believe in evolution, if you don’t believe in climate change, if you think vaccines are bad for you, if you imagine that there is some kind of conspiracy among scientists to put out information just to ruin your day or make you question your religious beliefs, it wouldn’t make sense to believe doctors, either, when they say you need to lower your cholesterol intake.
Now, if I were a Republican, I imagine I’d see a study like this and conclude that listening to doctors might actually be a good idea, but that is also why I am not a Republican. Because if I were a Republican, actually, I would just go ahead and assume that this, too, was fake and invented out of whole cloth as an attempt to encourage us to “comply” with health advice from experts instead of getting all of our information from random podcast hosts with no medical background — as a precursor, obviously, to some kind of communist enslavement system. I would also be weirdly oppositional to the point where I would just go ahead and stab myself in the eye if I heard a liberal talking about how people should not stab themselves in the eye.
But hey! They cut off their noses and now we are officially spited, so we’re just going to have to sit with that for a while and think about what we’ve done.
PREVIOUSLY ON WONKETTE!
"We have to assume that this is very good news... for John McCain?
But seriously, the right is filled with all these dudes believing they are *crushing it* with alpha male vitality. I guess maybe they ain't so much.
Something else: I live in an outer suburb of Chicago. My doctor(s) are all in what they call a "clinic" -- a web of doctors' offices, clinics and small hospitals spanning several counties. I'm old and deteriorating, so I've seen a lot of doctors there. Most of them -- IIRC, all but two -- have been brown-skinned foreigners. If Republicans are seeing the same doctors, it's probably more likely that they'll ignore their advice. After all, they're Republicans.
BTW, my doctors are uniformly pleasant and competent.