ArticleHealth affairs scholar2024
Politicians, power, and the people's health: US elections and state health outcomes, 2012-2024.
Article in Health affairs scholar, 2024. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 8 papers.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
8 citing papers in PubMed.
- Association of pandemic-era US county-level policies with adult health and health behaviors.SSM - population health · 2026Article
- Electoral governance as a political determinant of health: state policy context, risk perception, and voter safety.Frontiers in public health · 2026Article
- Social policies as determinants of health: new evidence, ongoing challenges, and future pathways.Health affairs scholar · 2025Article
- Political determinants of US states' screening-amenable cancer stage at diagnosis and premature cancer mortality.JNCI cancer spectrum · 2025Observational
- Conceptualizing and Measuring Systemic Racism.Annual review of public health · 2025Review
- Buyer's Remorse, Betrayal, and Blame: Who Will Be Held Responsible for the Adverse Health Impacts of the US Elections?American journal of public health · 2025Article
- Threats to Democracy and the Right to Health.American journal of public health · 2025Article
- State reproductive rights policies and unintended pregnancy.Pregnancy (Hoboken, N.J.) · 2025Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
10 authors.
Funding
Abstract
Our descriptive study examined current associations (2022-2024) between US state-level health outcomes and 4 US state-level political metrics: 2 rarely used in public health research (political ideology of elected representatives based on voting records; trifectas, where 1 party controls the executive and legislative branches) and 2 more commonly used (state policies enacted; voter political lean). The 8 health outcomes spanned the life course: infant mortality, premature mortality (death at age <65), health insurance (adults aged 35-64), vaccination for children and persons aged ≥65 (flu; COVID-19 booster), maternity care deserts, and food insecurity. For the first 3 outcomes, we also examined trends in associations (2012-2024). For all political metrics, higher state-level political conservatism was associated with worse health outcomes, especially for the metrics for political ideology and state trifectas. For example, in 2016, the premature mortality rate in states with Republican vs Democratic trifectas was higher by 55.4 deaths per 100 000 person-years (95% CI: 7.7, 103.1), and the slope of the rate of increase to 2021 was also higher, by 27.0 deaths per 100 000 person-years (95% CI: 24.4, 29.7). These results suggest elections, political ideology, and concentrations of political power matter for population health.
Indexed as
Identifiers
What Socratic holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the Socratic graph.