Republican politicians breed, raise, slaughter and eat working people?
..
Really. Well, I guess they aren't EATING them... so there's that...
But.
Why Are So Many Middle-Aged White Americans Dying?
Now, a new analysis from the Commonwealth Fund suggests there’s more to the story. The report, by David Squires and David Blumenthal, notes that between 1999 and 2014, mortality rates in the U.S. rose for white Americans aged 22 and 56. Before that, death rates had been falling by nearly 2 percent each year since 1968. Squires and Blumenthal call the difference between the those two mortality trend lines—the expected, declining one and the actual, rising one—the “mortality gap.”
This trend was especially concentrated in the South, they found. “In seven southern states—West Virginia, Mississippi, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Kentucky, Alabama, and Arkansas—the gap between actual and expected mortality in 2014 exceeded 200 deaths per 100,000 people. In West Virginia, mortality rates were higher than at any time since 1980,” they write. The report was not published in a peer-reviewed journal, and its raw data was not made available.