from the original Nature article:
By the 2020s, conservatives were dying at significantly higher rates than liberals, with the gap concentrated in internal causes (for example, heart disease, cancer and stroke). The divide since 2020 is substantial: while only 0.2% of ‘very liberal’ respondents died of internal causes between 2020 and 2022, the probability for people who identified as ‘very conservative’ was 1.14 percentage points higher (P = 0.021; 95% confidence interval (CI), (0.18, 2.11)). This gap is not limited to deaths from COVID-19 and is not reducible to demographic or geographic differences between the groups, nor is it a pure function of ageing: previous cohorts’ death patterns in older data did not show a similar correlation between health and ideology before 2010.
We suggest that these growing health gaps are consistent with a mechanism of politically rooted changes in engagement with the health system. Using a large public opinion survey, we find that people on the right, particularly Trump voters and Republicans, express less trust in their personal doctor and are less willing to seek care for non-COVID-19-related health problems18,19. We also find that people on the right with chronic illnesses are more sceptical than people on the left that medicines to treat those illnesses are safe and effective. This political divide in consumption of care may sustain or deepen the health divide that has emerged in recent decades. However, both these findings and those on health outcomes are purely descriptive; more work is needed to uncover causal relationships.
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