Growing Influence of State Governments on Population Health in the United States
jamanetwork.com
jamanetwork.com
Gee I wonder why they picked that particular five-month period for a pandemic that lasted two years: https://www.bioinformaticscro.com/blog/states-ranked-by-age-...
> [Rank] [State] [Death Rate] [Age-Adjusted Death Rate]
> 11 New Jersey 353 340
> 11 New York 358 340
> ...
> 31 Connecticut 296 265
> 32 Florida 313 263
> 32 Illinois 263 263
> 34 Delaware 286 261
> 35 Maryland 249 255
For some reason Florida gets a ton of press coverage despite its completely average outcomes, yet nobody hears about states like Connecticut or Illinois that had identical outcomes.
The thesis of the article is similarly offered without support.
> Although the divergence in state health trajectories might reflect changes in demographic and socioeconomic characteristics, a more likely potential explanation is the growing polarization of public policies across states.
The article attempts to correct for just one variable, demographics:
> The widening gap cannot be explained by changes in the racial and ethnic composition of states, because the same trend occurred within racial and ethnic groups.
It doesn't seem to even occur to the authors that there are salient differences between New York and Oklahoma that may drive public policy as well as health outcomes. A white person in New York is going to be much more likely to have a safe office job, while someone in Oklahoma is going to be much more likely to have a more dangerous job in agriculture or industry. That, in turn, may well drive less risk-tolerant public policies in New York and more risk-tolerant public policies in Oklahoma.
And given that death rates are driven by things like heart disease, diabetes complications, and cancer, it didn't occur to the authors to account for the fact that obesity rates in Oklahoma are almost 40% higher than New York?
Do not state governments represent "the public"? And how is devolution of power to the states (and then counties, and then cities) an "experiment"?
If that isn't convincing, here is George Washington, January 9, 1790: "The establishment of our new Government seemed to be the last great experiment for promoting human happiness."
[1] https://www.historians.org/teaching-and-learning/teaching-re...
Increasingly, no. Using Florida as an example, compare the popular vote spread (52%-47%) to the house seats (60%-40%). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_United_States_House_of_Re... This is just one example of how election winners in the US - both local and national - are trending over time to be less representative of the people they, well, represent.
>And how is devolution of power to the states (and then counties, and then cities) an "experiment"?
"experiment" in your quoted text refers to the first sentence in the paragraph you quoted. No need to try and twist the meaning of words by taking them out of context. The whole thing is itself a very common reference to the writings of U.S. Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis in New State Ice Co. v. Liebmann to describe how "a single courageous State may, if its citizens choose, serve as a laboratory; and try novel social and economic experiments without risk to the rest of the country."
When people are free to cross state lines, and when the poor are being pushed out of blue states into red states:
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/democrats-most-alarming-probl...
that conclusion absolutely cannot be made based just on a simple correlation.
The paper closes with:
>>Although state governments have the right to set their own path and policies, the public should decide whether life expectancy should be part of the experiment.
Even assuming the causative associations claimed exist, this is a case of optimizing for a single metric, and ignoring all others. What if higher life expectancy is being attained at the expense of other, important metrics? An example of one such metric is fertility, with red states having higher fertility rates than blue states:
https://www.yahoo.com/lifestyle/republicans-more-kids-democr...
But the author, without even considering or contending with these points, is already clamoring to end state sovereignty and homogenize policy across the US.
Pure nonsense. How are such small minds able to make it so far?