Dr. James H. Gundlach

@pecanjim.bsky.social

Retired Sociology/Demography professor. I know the United States has an awfully high middle aged death rate. My goal is to explain it well enough to get people to fix it.

Let's first get the regression statistics predicting life expectancy plus the predicted life expectancy for the hypothetical state with 100% non-religious people.

r 0.53
b 0.18
a 72.64
y' x=100 91.03

This graph clearly shows that where the percent of a state that is non--religious the life expectancy is longer. In other words the more religious a state the higher the death rate. But the mere fact of a correlation does not tell us which variable causes the other. I entered the variables into the regression equation where percent without religion was the independent variable but I really don't know which variable is a cause and and which is an effect. In fact there could be another variable or variables not included here that cause or causes both.

Here are my general thoughts after close to six decades of working and playing with mortality data:

Early deaths are a major source of religious beliefs that promote a future of souls after death. I even think Southern Baptist and some other fundamentalist religions use prayer for health care to increase death rates to increase church attendance. In looking at the death rates under age 1, The correlation between state percent Southern Baptist and age 0 death rate is 0.74. Using regression results between state percent Southern Baptist and age 0 death rates, I estimate the 2024 death rate for non-Southern Baptist is 461 per 100,00 and for Southern Baptist it is 1010 per 100,000.

Here is a link to a solid examination of views on health care and ending life:
https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2013/11/21/views-on-end-of-life-medical-treatments/

The key here is that the age group dominated by capitalist health insurance is the one showing an increase in death rates. Both young age groups are primarily paid for by capitalist health insurance but the young have almost universal state funded health care for the elderly. The aged 20-64 is dominated by capitalist health insurance and it is the only one showing an increase in death rates from 1999 to 2024. The elderly in covered by Medicare and capitalist health insurance funded clones. Unfortunately I have not been able to separate mortality data for the elderly by which of the two elderly health insurance systems fund care. But to a large degree the elderly capitalist funded Medicaid follows Medicaid procedures. But there is increasing evidence that the Capitalist version is increasingly denying care.

In general I think the graph shows that providing universal coverage produces a death rate that is about 30% lower than capitalist health insurance.

The country data used to producing these rankings that shows where our stater are within the range3 of country and states put together and ranked by life expectancy: The country data is from:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_life_expectancy

And the state data is from wonder.cdc.gov, it takes some learning how to get the data you want from this link: Underlying Cause of Death at this data set.

The highest ranked state, the state with the longest life expectancy, is Hawaii which shares the 58th and 59th live expectancy with the Czech Republic with a life expectancy, the age by which half the people die, of 80. The lowest ranked is West Virginia, with a life expectancy of 72.2 which is tied in ranking with India. And the lack of a complete number on the map is just another mistake I made and I don't have time now to go remake the map. Anyway, here is a table of states by life expectancy so you can see what got each state ranked where they are:

ST Life Expectancy
AL 73.8
AK 75.8
AZ 76.7
AR 73.9
CA 79.3
CO 78.5
CT 79.4
DE 76.5
DC 76.6
FL 77.9
GA 75.9
HI 80
ID 78.4
IL 77.5
IN 75.4
IA 77.9
KS 76.5
KY 73.6
LA 73.8
ME 76.6
MD 77.8
MA 79.8
MI 76.8
MN 79.3
MS 72.6
MO 75.2
MT 77.3
NE 78.3
NV 76.4
NH 78.7
NJ 79.6
NM 74.5
NY 79.5
NC 75.9
ND 77.9
OH 75.6
OK 73.8
OR 77.7
PA 77.3
RI 79.2
SC 75.1
SD 77.3
TN 73.8
TX 77.1
UT 79
VT 78.3
VA 77.5
WA 78.4
WV 72.2
WI 78.1
WY 76.8

Some of my earlier post have shown similar patterns in death rates by age and party. This one is different in that it looks at the changes in death rates from 1999 to 2024. Why do I start with 1999? There are two reasons: The first is that is the year that the Bureau of Vital Statistics adopted the current format for available data on line. The second is that this is very close to when the current patterns in our death rates started.

The major part of this graph that shows how the United States death rates are different from the patterns found in all the other economically developed countries is the increasing death rates over time for ages 16 through around age 30. This unique pattern is caused by how paying for health care changes as we enter adult hood. This is moving from capitalist health insurance with holes covered by state coverage of most of the uninsured young to health care payment being dominated by capitalist health insurance for the middle aged.

If the United States showed changes in death rates by age that are shown in the rest of the economically developed part of earth there would not be desperate lines for state equivalent parts of countries. And the line would be very close to a strait line running from where are youngest Democratic voting states were in 2024 to where the age 70+ dots were in 2024.

To get a easy number to compare to present here I have calculated comparable Canada and United States death rates for populations aged 0-84 I calculated the average of the United States death rates as a percent of the same Canada deaths areas for 2024 and got 180%.

I ended the. time covered b y this graph with 2019 data because COVID makes the later data less comparable over time. The main thing the graph shows the effect of how we pay for health care on death rates. The United States is unique in having a mixed way of paying for health care and this graph shows that the way we choose to pay for health care has a major effect on death rates. The young are primary covered covered by capitalist health insurance with most of the young who are not covered by that insurance able to get backed up health care through states paying for it. While the young dots bounce around a lot, they average about a 30% decline in their death rate. Then comes all three lines of dots moving from that healthy decline of about 40% at age 16 to a unique on earth 30% to 40% increase at age 30. This unique, I consider it evil, increase in death rates is caused by the unique move to almost pure capitalist system of paying for health care in the United States. At the end of this peak in the increasing death rates, political party in power in states begins to show differences in death rate trends.People in Democrat voting states show the lowest dots for the remaining age groups displayed while Republican voting state show the highest and except for age group 85+ when the mixed party group moves to the top. The age by which the parties move to consistently decline also differ. The last Democrat increase is age 38, the same for Mixed Parties is age 41 but the Republican voting states have increasing single year age groups, off and on, up to age 58.

While the United States shows late middle age declining death rates they really don't reach the level of declines seen in the rest the economically developed countries until age 72. If the United States death rates were like the rest of the economically develo0pted world, the middle age dots would fit in a relatively strait line between age 16 and 72.

From 1999 through 2017 the non-Democratic party effects steadily increased a little more among Republican voting states than among mixed party voting states. Then for the two years before COVID that long trend reversed. Then, during the first year of COVID, the year before vaccine, the Democrat voting states clearly showed being hit harder than the other states. This is primary due to the coast areas, where COVID hit first, being hit harder by COVID during this year and the Democrats being substantially over represented in coastal areas. In general I find this pronounced COVID effect to be due to the coastal areas being hit by COVID during this first year being caused by early lack of knowledge about how to fight it and the lack of a vaccine that became available close to the time between the first and second year. The other thing that is operating is the slower adoption of vaccination by the conservative Christians. I hypothesize that there was an increased adoption of vaccination when the vaccine rejectors saw a close unvaccinated person die from COVID.

But, I think the important thing the last dot shows is the 1999 through 2017 trend is back!

Here are the states in each politcal group:
Dem Mix Rep
CA AZ AL
CO GA AK
CT IA AR
DE MI FL
DC MN ID
HI NH IN
IL NC KS
ME OH KY
MD PA LA
MA TX MS
NV WI MO
NJ MT
NM NE
NY ND
OR OK
RI SC
VT SD
VA TN
WA UT
WV
WY

This is a very good graph showing the national data on the size of the Souther Baptist population in the United Staters. What I am doing here is showing the basis of my hypothesis of the cause of the decline in Southern Baptism:The high Southern Baptist infant mortality rate is causing them to lose members.

Some background Southern Baptist gained the ability to use church based health care as a side note in Obama Care. My guess is that the Southern Baptist gained this by offering the final additional votes to pass it to president Obama. As the Baptist church offers both health insurance and hospitals they can effectively promote the cheapest health care: PRAYER! it is also ineffective, see graphs 2 through 4 for what I am presenting here.

The second one shows the relationship between the available measure of state level of Southern Population and state infant mortality rates. The third one shows the relationship between the number of Southern Baptist churches listed in the current on-line version of the Yellow Pages for each state per state population divided by 100,000. This is my new measure of the level of Southern Baptism in each state. The final one shows the relationship between this new measure of Southern Baptism and age 20-64 death rates in 2024.

This graph displays 171 percentages showing young, 0-19, middle aged, 20-64, and elderly, 65+, age groups death rates as a percent of their 1968 death rates. In general the time covered by this graph should have death rates reflecting a very constant increase in health care's ability to keep people alive longer, by showing consistently declining death rates, the COVID epidemic is an exception. The bottom line of blue diamond dots shows an almost constant declining young death rate. The period of minimal decline, about 2000-2010 was ended by the almost universal adoption of states starting to pay for the uninsured young people's health care.

There are two very bad parts of these lines. The first is for the elderly from 1977 to 2000.Here we have almost a quarter of century where our elderly ended the period with almost exactly the same death rate as they started it with, It ended with declining death rates after Medicare picked up paying for a major cost of modern health care, prescriptions.

The changing death rates that out does this bad elderly data is the age 20-64 death rates consistently increasing from 1998 until COVID hit in 2020. One problem I see in the data is the reported COVID deaths are a much smaller number than the increases we see in the COVID years.

I think the major cause of the recent non-COVID increases in the middle aged death rates is the health insurance industry denying care since they moved to requiring prior approval of care. Unfortunately I cannot find any data that allows me to measure that denial of care in a way I can statistically relate it to total death rates by age group.

To summarize this trend I present a simple char showing Canada's 2023 age group deaths rates as a percent of the comparable United States death rates.

See that dot toward the top and close to the left of the graph, The six year-olds in Alabama have a death rate for these three years that had a death rate 136% as high as the same measure in Democrat voting states. The clear pattern in the mixed party voting states, Republican voting states and Alabama is Democrat voting states have lower deaths rates, the only different one is for people aged 85+ in Republican voting states which is 2% lower. Alabama clearly has higher death rtes.

I have used data for three years rather than the usual one year to add stability to the dots for the younger years. Small numbers of populations show the same increased variation that causes demographers to prefer larger numbers in their samples. l used three years of data to increase stability but even that does not produce enough cases ion the younger single year age groups to produce stable lines at the younger ages. Anyway you should be able to see that Alabama has the highest death rates shown followed by Republican voting states followed by mixed party voting states (the states in each group are shown below).

democratic mixed party Republican
06 (California) 04 (Arizona) 01 (Alabama)
08 (Colorado) 13 (Georgia) 02 (Alaska)
09 (Connecticut) 9 (Iowa) 05 Arkansas
10 (Delaware) 26 (Michigan) 12 (Florida)
11 (DC) 27 (Minnesota) 16 (Idaho)
15 (Hawaii) 33 (New Hamp) 18 (Indiana)
17 (Illinois) 37 (North Carolina)20 (Kansas)
23 (Maine) 39 (Ohio) 21 (Kentucky)
24 (Maryland) 42 (Pennsylvania) 22 (Louisiana)
25 (Ma)55 (Wisconsin) 28 (Mississippi)
32 (Nevada) 29 (Missouri)
34 (New Jersey) 30 (Montana)
35 (New Mexico) 31 (Nebraska)
36 (New York) 38 (North Dakota)
41 (Oregon) 40 (Oklahoma)
44 (Rhode Island) 45 (South Carolina)
50 (VT) 46 ( SD)
47 (Tennessee)
49 (UT)
54 (WV)
56 (WY)

The Bureau of Vital Statistics has a data access system that allows access to a second cause of death that is reported for a fairly large portion of the population. I just discovered that I can access the death certificates that will allow me to count the total number of deaths that list COVID at the first and second cause of death. I have produce the data that allows me to calculate a total number of deaths.

Some of you may question the cases where COVID is entered as the second cause of death on death certificates. What is happening is that the doctors filling out the death certificate based form. Basically listing COVID as the second cause of death means COVID caused the cause listed as the first cause. If I could find data on the third or larger numbered cause, I would add them the number of COVID deaths that. Actually, thinking about this has added looking at all the post COVID causes need to be worked with.

Here are the COVID data I show total numbers for the years we have current data for:
Group N of deaths
Normal COVID 1,035,634
Added as 2nd 180,925
Total COVID 1,216,559

I should do more with this but I need to go to bed and get up early for a doctor's visit tomorrow.

This morning I ran across a measure of the quality of nurses' work life here:

https://wallethub.com/edu/best-states-for-nurses/4041

Since my mother was a nurse I am concerned about how nurses are treated and when I ran across this measure I decided to look at the effect of quality of our nurses work and the middle age death rates. I am looking at the middle aged death rates because they clearly are the ones in the United States who receive the worst health care. Actually that comparison is for the all the economically developed countries.

For all states the regression statistics are:
r=0.63
b=3.6
a=285.1
With South Carolina, that lonely little dot up near the middle of the top of the graph, an outlier, the regression statistics are:
r=0.70
b= 3.7
a=277.5

In general the exclusion of outlying South Carolina, which I have found to have the constantly higher than predicted death rate, increases r from 0.63 to 0.70.

Anyway, this suggests increasing the quality of work life is too important to be cut as a means to reduce the cost of health care.

The Republican voting states still have the highest death rates. In fact they look just as much higher as they were in this kind of graph I produced with earlier years of data. The mixed party is still close to 100% most of the way across. And the Democratic voting states are well below and it takes moving onto our most socialist health care for the mixed party and
Republican voting states to come together as the oldest ages. The big change in this graph is the the Democratic voting states stay much lower in this latest data than they did earlier.

Comparing the Republican voting states death rates with the Democratic voting states: The Republican voting states had 927,403 deaths in 2024 and if the had experienced the Democratic states deaths rates they would have had 174,586 fewer or 18.8 percent.

The mixed party states had 792,233 and If they had experienced the Democrat voting states rate they would have saved 121,307 lives, that 15.3 percent.

Here are the states by my grouping into party voting:

DemMix Rep
CA AZ AL
CO GA AK
CT IA AR
DE MI FL
DC MN ID
HI NH IN
IL NC KS
ME OH KY
MD PA LA
MA TX MS
NV WI MO
NJ MT
NM NE
NY ND
OR OK
RI SC
VT SD
VA TN
WA UT
WV
WY

This is another attempt to show that the United States is not getting its money's worth out of our health care system. Counties that spend much less on health care than we do while they are living much longer.

In the past I have posted a graph that showed how single year age death rates from 1999 through 2024 correlated with year. In general it showed the young, who primarily have capitalist health insurance but almost all of the states have state funded care for the uninsured young had weak correlations showing fair declining death rates. For the middle aged those correlations shifter to positive as they age increased to peaking at about 0.97 at age 30 and did not shift to consistently negative until Medicare with the capitalist clone, Medicaid, kicked in. From age 65 to 84 and 85+the correlations showed constant declining death rates. Anyway, our poor position on this graph is due to the way capitalist provide health care for the ages they control access to health care.

The measured COVID deaths are removed. Part of the problem removing COVID deaths is that many of the deaths of COVID infected people are labeled caused by a stronger cause of death that infects the victim that has been exacerbated by the COVID infection.

This graph focuses on the middle aged because this age group includes all but the very old who have had the most pronounced increases in death rates in the United States.

The major thing this graph shows that the group of Democrat voting group of states here here have substantially lower death rates, followed by mixed party and topped off by the Republican voting states.

While the graphs show the deaths per 100,000 experienced by the three groups of states by year, here are the numbers of actual, number and percent more than at Democrats:

In Republican voting states:
Number: 1,680,717
Number over Democrats rate: 494,701
Percent over Democrats number: 29.4%

In Mixed party states: 1,349,378
Number over Democrat rate: 255,995
Percent over Democrats number: 19.0%

My thoughts: The 255,995 plus 494,701 party total excess is 750,696 middle aged deaths in the United States from 2018 through 2024. In WWII we experienced 407,300 combat deaths. During these few years, our deaths in the Republican and mixed party voting states had almost twice as many more deaths than they would have had at the Democratic voting states deaths yearly death rates.

The reason I put this together was I wanted to point out that Democrat voting states had lower death rates than mixed party states who had lower death rates than Republican voting states. See, this is just another Trump lie.

But as I looked at it there seems to be increases during Trump's time and declining death rates in all three political groups of states during Biden's term if you recognize that it takes at least a year for politics to put things in place that can reduce death rates. And, Biden did do several things to reduce death rates, one that I have found is limit private health insurance's right to deny care to people who have kept paying for it. And these changes are much larger than the COVID effect. I started to remove COVID deaths but Trump can best be described as pro-COVID while Biden was clearly anti-COVID.

Well enough said for a quick post.

I wish we had faster production of mortality data. I would like to daily tabulations that saved for every day and added to an ongoing tabulation for the current year that are less than a month old. I know it is possible, it would take more people and money. My subconscious just said "Dream on Jim."

Here is a simple scatter plot of the number of gun stores listed in the online version of the on line Yellow Pages about a month ago. Unlike most most data sources used in research, these change every time a new gun store opens or closes so any replication will have slightly different results. But this is a measure that the gun industry cannot lobby against producing and all that has to be done is spend about an hour running 51 searches for "firearms " with the two letter state abbreviation and scrolling down almost to the bottom of the first page to get the total number. In other searches I have found the limit of 3,000 results a problem but not with this search.

Here are the regression analysis summary statistics:
r = 0.87
b = 0.71
a = 2.23
The 2.23 is the predicted firearm suicide rate for states with no gun stores. Now the fact is, it is easy to buy a gun from another state. But that is immeasurable. Using the b of 0.71 we can estimate that a state with with 10 firearm stores per 100,000 people is predicted to have a gun suicide rate of 2.23+(10*0.71) pr 1.23+7.1 or 9.33, which is 4.18 times as high as the predicted rate for the hypothetical state with 0 stores.

Note that i report r not r squared. Here is why: The interpretation of the plain un-squared r is the percent of the sum raw errors in predicting Y form X is shown in r. When r-squared is used it is the percent of variation which is the sum of the errors squared. I find the use of r-squared by scientists is just another way science becomes more difficult for the general public to understand and it makes the relationship look weaker. A r=.50 means you can reduce your errors in predicting y by knowing x is 50%. Using the equivalent r squared = .25 means you can reduce the variation, the sum of the errors squared, by 25%. In the world I live in I can explain r to the public a lot easier than I can r squared.

All the dots above the line of numbers showing age show death rates increasing over these years and those dots below that line show declining death rates. The further a dot is from the zero line, the more constant the amount of change from year to year.

When I look at that set of correlations between year and death rates, I think of how these correlations change by how we pay for health care. The infants have the most consistently supported efforts to keep them alive and they have the strongest negative correlations, very close to that ideal -1.00. Then the young from age one through the late teens have fairly strong negative correlations are primary covered by their parent's capitalist health insurance but most states provide socialist health care for most of the uninsured young. The fact that they are all below zero is fair but the fact that they are a lot higher than the infants is bad. Then that line of dots going from strong negatives to positives close to 0.80 show the consistent increases in death rates with increasing age up to age 30. Then the correlations decline to close to zero indicating little change for a decade from the middle 40's to the middle 50's. Then from about age 55 to age 70 there is a consistent higher rate of declining death rates. This is the period when Medicaid and the capitalist clone, Medicare, phase in. Then and only then does the trend in death rates get almost as good as there were during the first year of life. What is happening here? Medicare, a nearly complete socialist health care is phased in with the almost as good copy, Medicare.

If I repeated this graph for Canada and most of the other industrialized countries, the line of dots would be close to strait across close to -1.00 from age 0 to 90. Not only do they have better health care they have yearly data by age for several years past our 84.

Our death rate changes since 1999 clearly show that capitalist health care simply kills us early.

Who makes our laws?

The United States is unique among the industrialized societies because we pay the most for health care and are not even in the top fifty of the lists of countries ranked by life expectancy now that our CIA has deleted their ranking of countries, they had us 49th, unique among the on-line rankings I have found.

Looking at the graph the most unique thing I see is that the middle aged death rates, excluding COVID have consistently gone up and this rate has substantially increased during the COVID years. Then it declined substantially since 2021, when COVID vaccine was available. This increase has been seen as a possible miss classification of COVID deaths. But a look at the age 65+ and 0-18 death rates, we can see that among them the non-COVID death rates are uniquer declining death rates in their ages groups. This difference in the middle age and elderly non-COVID death rates during the COVID epidemic makes me think the capitalist health insurance industry used the COVID epidemic as an opportunity to deny more care. Unfortunately, we have no measure of the number of people needing health care were denied care by the misnamed health insurance industry.

The fairly consistent decline in the infant and age 65+ death care rates just happen to be by the people who are not entirely dependent on the health insurance industry to receive care. Most of the elderly have access to Medicare and the capitalist incomplete clone while almost all the states pay for emergency care for the uninsured young.

The last point I will make is the decline in non-COVID death rates among the ages 1-64 also happened during the time President Biden implement several improvements to their access to health care during his single term as president. Here is a link to one discussion of most of them:

https://publichealth.jhu.edu/2025/bidens-public-health-wins

Here are some regression results I produced back in 2019. I tried to re-do it with more current data but I can no longer get any of my web browsers to search and capture the data. What I did was conduct searches for each country name and the word jicama for all the countries listed in the now extinct CIA World Factbook. (yes they spelled it as one word) But Trump's administration has deleted the web site with no announcement. In general I am trying to put together the data to do this again with more current data but everything I am trying does not work.

If you see the mean for the dummy variable jicama, you will see 0.203 which means 20.3% of the countries have a 1 on the dummy variable included in the regression equation with all the other variables I found significantly related to country life expectancy. Now, the list of other variables cannot be considered inclusive but with a multiple r of 0.74 . That means you can reduce your errors in predicting country life expectancy by 74% when you use these variables. I looked at the effect of several other variables and have excluded the others that hat a p >.05.

The important statistic is the b=4.32 for the jicama dummy variable. That means when you control for the effect of percent obese, money spent on health care and median country income, the jicama eating countries have a life expectancy that is 4.32 years longer than the countries that don't.

Now this is not solid enough research to be published in our properly reviewed journals but adding it as a regular vegetable that replaces another regularly really does not cost more and adds income to the people who grow jicama, or even growing it yourself, here is a link to see if you can grow it:

https://theultimatehomestead.com/planting-guide/jicama/texas/

Oh, I live near Montgomery, Alabama and there is an international grocery store there that sells good fresh jicama for less than $1.00 per pound.

And, this is just another way I looked at life expectancy.

This is a simple graph, the higher the vertical golden bar, the higher the death rate. And toward the top of each gold bar is the number of infant deaths per 100,000 under that population that group of states experienced in 2024.

Canada ranks near the top of most efforts to rank countries by life expectancy. Our Democratic voting states have an infant death rate that is 14.4 percent higher than Canada's. The Mixed Party states death rate is 596.2, that is 212.2 deaths per 100,000 or 55.3 percent higher The Republican voting states have an infant death rate of 655.6 deaths per 100,000, that is 271.6 deaths per 100,000 or 70.7 percent higher.

The a,.yx posted earlier is the life expectancy for the hypothetical state with no cigarette smokers, 86.65 years. Again that is the age by which half of the non-smokers would die. The b.yx, the regression coefficient is a -.,4392 which is the change in life expectancy for each percent smoking. Multiplying that -.4392 by 100 to estimated the death rate of the 100% smoking population the means that estimate is 86.65 minus 43.92 or a life expectancy of only 42.73 years.

Now I have looked at the percent smoking and national life expectancy and found that the United States has a much lower life expectancy than the national level data, both sets of data suggest that cigarettes in the United States are much more deadly than they are in other countries,.

Well, here is the state data, life expectancy and percent smoking cigaretts are shortened to effective label the columns of data:

ST lifeexp % cigsmok
AL 75.5 21.1
AK 78.2 19.9
AZ 79.3 16.5
AR 75.9 24.7
CA 81.2 12.9
CO 80.2 15.7
CT 80.6 15.4
DE 78.4 19.9
FL 78.5 17.6
GA 79.6 17.4
HI 81.6 14.1
ID 79.6 15.9
IL 79.3 16.5
IN 77.1 22.9
IA 79.1 18.5
KS 78.3 18.1
KY 75.6 26.2
LA 76 24
ME 78.4 19.3
MD 79 14.6
MA 80.7 14.7
MI 78.1 21.2
MN 80.6 16.3
MS 74.5 23
MO 77.2 20.6
MT 78.6 19.9
NE 79.4 17.3
NV 78.3 17
NH 79.6 17.5
NJ 80.5 15.1
NM 77.2 19.1
NY 81.2 14.4
NC 77.8 19.1
ND 79.2 19.9
OH 77 21
OK 75.9 21.1
OR 79.6 17
PA 78.5 19.9
RI 79.8 16.3
SC 76.9 21.5
SD 78.5 18.6
TN 75.8 24.2
TX 78.8 14.5
UT 79.9 9.7
VT 79.9 16.4
VA 79.3 19.5
WA 80.2 15.3
WV 74.7 26.7
WI 79.3 17.4
WY 78.3 19.5

P.S.: I am glad I quit smoking back when I was a sophomore at Oklahoma State University. It was hard, I had the last urge to get a cigarette about six years after I quit.

The dots are too scattered to make sense up until the last couple of years and by then the slope is too small to really see.

But the lines show a slight increase in COVID rates by immigration rates during the first year, the blue line. The second year, the red one, shows the most pronounced negative relationship, followed by an almost parallel sloping line for the third year. The fourth and fifth years show much lower COVID death rates that slope less, and I don't know if the reason I can see it is I spend so much time looking at scatter plots I don't know if the reason I can see it is because I spend so much time playing with them .

Anyway, the slopes, aka regression coefficients, by years are: 2020 = 0.77, 2021 = -1.77, 2022 = -0.75, 2023 = -0.25 and 2024 = -0.16. Yes, all of them after vaccine became available are negative.

Now the reason I put this together is in response to someone blaming immigrants for causing our COVID deaths. I actually think most of our contact with germs in the rest of the world is through air planes and just like immigrants, the ones coming from the rest of the world, evein if they are Americans who just spent a little time there, most of them hit coastal states first. The major difference I see is that after COVID vaccines are available, the percent immigrant is negative related to death rates and that may related the the Southern Baptist refusing vaccination and they are home grown not imported.

These dots show the percent change in single year ages over two thee-year periods. The first, red squares, are for 2018-2020 during the Republican president Trump's first term. Except for a few dots for the young, all the red squares show that that age's death rates increased.

The second line of dots, blue diamonds, show the percent change in single year age death rates from 2022 through 2024, during Biden's term as president. There is not enough room here to describe everything Biden put in place to bring death rates down, but here is a link to a site that does it:

https://www.politico.com/interactives/2024/biden-healthcare-legacies/

In general, Biden did a lot to bring death rates down and the data collected from death certificates show that his efforts have saved a lot of lives. In a future post I will present an estimate of just how many lives voters saved by electing Biden. If I am still alive and able, an am now 83 years old, when mortality data for Trump's current term are published I will repeat this kind of analysis showing the effect of death rate changes during his term.

A final note on why the red squares are so much higher over the zero line than the blue diamonds are below the line. The basic fact is it is easier and cheaper to let people die when they need health care to stay alive than it is to let the die so the red squares are much further above the zero line than the blue diamonds are below it.

Here is the results of a regression analysis of the effect of state percent vote for Trump versus Harris and state percent Southern Baptist on COVIOD death rates. Now these two variables are highly related and both are strong single predictors of this death rate. What I am presenting here is a summary of the multiple regression analysis predicting the displayed five year COVID death rate with both percent of the state vote in presidential election Trump got against Harris and percent of the state Southern Baptist.

CumCOVID = 118.987 + 2.913(PctBap2020) + 3.440(PctTrump)

CumCOVID is short name for the total five year COVID death rate that the statistical program would accept. The 118.987 is the regression analysis predicted COVID death rate for a hypothetical state that had 0 percent Southern Baptist and had nobody vote for Trump. The regression coefficient of 2.913 for state percent Southern Baptist means that for each additional percent of a state Southern Baptist the death rate increased by 2.913 percent and for the hypothetical 100% that is an addition 291.3 deaths per 100,000. Now for the percent of the vote for Trump, the regression coefficient is 3.440 which can be used to predict a 100% Southern Baptist effect by simply moving the decimal point two spaces to the right giving an estimated increase of 344.0 in a hypothetical state with 100% Southern Baptist. Now for the hypothetical state that is 100% Southern Baptist and 100% voted for Trump that gives us an estimated death rate for the Trump voting Southern Baptist of 754.3 which is 6.34 times as high as the predicted death rate for the hypothetical state with no Southern Baptist or Trump voters. Now we don't have any such state, but this is an estimate of the death rate for the non-Southern Baptist non Trump voter of 118.987, lets round that up to 119, compared to a death rate of 754.3 Southern Baptist Trump voters.

How is that for playing with numbers?

Here I will do two things, discuss the party differences and post the data:

Among females the mixed party is closer to the high death rate Republicans than they are among males. Why? Discrimination against females is harder to fight than it is among males.

Here is the data:
Year Dem F. Rep F Mixed Females
1999 797.9 945 905.4
2000 794.2 945.1 908.2
2001 794.1 941.1 894.9
2002 788.1 946.2 900.4
2003 783.4 940.3 894.3
2004 758.4 907 868.4
2005 764.1 915.7 882.7
2006 749.6 894.6 859.7
2007 736.8 881.8 850.7
2008 740.7 897.1 864.2
2009 720.1 870.5 839.4
2010 720.2 881.4 850
2011 730.2 885.7 865.6
2012 725.4 892.6 864.9
2013 733.1 901.2 873.6
2014 725.1 901.6 875.2
2015 746.6 916.5 898
2016 745.1 920 895.5
2017 755.5 934.1 908.7
2018 753 935.6 907.1
2019 750.3 929.6 906.7
2020 790.7 977.3 948.7
2021 768.5 984.8 936
2022 793.4 991.8 950.9
2023 774.5 963.7 927.9
2024 762.3 959.3 923.2

First notice the dramatic increases in the non-COVID death rates during the COVID epidemic years.

Second, notice how those increases are not much more than those that increased from 2014 through 2017.

Third, notice how much these non-COVID death rates declined during Biden's last three years as president.

Fourth, notice how much and which way they changed in the four years before Biden's years, aka Trump years.

Fifth, notice vertically how much closer the party dots have come to each other during the Biden years.

And finally, notice how the mixed party states have moved closer to the Republicans in this age 20 through 24 age group over these years.

If you are smart, you take this into account when you move. I hadn't done this before I moved to Alabama where male life expectancy is only 70.1,and since I am now in my 84th year, it is too late for me to use this knowledge to move.

I have nothing else to say today.

This is probably the most difficult graph to read that you have ever run into. It shows how single year age death rates for ages 0 through 84 have changed since 2020 and the next four years. Let me walk you through the dots for 20 year olds and hopefully then you can look at any age you are interested in. The top dot is the blue diamond and it is at a positive 4.9. That means that from the year's data for 2020 to 2021 the 20-year-olds in 2021 had a death rate that was 4.9 percent higher in deaths per 100,000 than it was in 2020. Then in 2022 the red square for 20-year olds was at of -4.4. That means that group of 20-year-olds had a 9.3, the distance between a positive 4.9 and a negative 4.4, percent decline during 2022. Now that is damned good! From 1999 to 2020 that death rate went up from 89.2 to 90.5 after COVID was removed, deaths per 100,000. Those health care improvements just didn't seem to be reaching middle aged people in the United States during the first two decades in the 20th century.

But things seem to be turning around in 2022. Notice how the ending on 2023 red squares seem to run almost constantly below the blue diamonds. And then the light grey triangles run well below them and finally the yellow x's really run below them. consecutive running below is a declining death rate.

The problem of increasing deaths seem to have concentrated among the very young, and this is with the measured COVID deaths removed. It is also unusual in that in the two previous decades, the young were consistently declining, not a consistent as the elderly but they had been doing much better than the middle aged.

In general, this shift to declining middle aged deaths was a major improvement in health care access in the United States.

Here is a link that describes much of what the Biden Harris administration did to improve our access to health care.

https://www.aft.org/hc/fall2024/chaney_harris_shoup_twomey

The lower dots over years means Biden has saved lives.

This is an unusual graph. It shows two correlations for each of 120 causes of death. The first on the blue dots with the pointed top is the value of the correlations between years 2017 through 2020 and the second is the same correlation for years 2021 through 2024 are displayed as the red squares. It is fairly easy to notice that the blue dots are somewhat clustered around the top which is due to their increasing death rates during the short time period 2017 through 2020. Then it is a little easier to see that the red squares are even more clustered around the bottom line showing that their death rates have been constantly declining during the years we have available data for the same number of years after 2020, 2021-2024. The shifting of dots from showing increasing to decreasing death rates increased from 36 to 91 detailed causes of deaths. This cannot be due to the discovery of a new health care procedure.

My first question is: Why does all these specific causes of death shift from constantly increasing to constantly decreasing?

In general I have seen and posted about this early increase in the middle age death rates since 1999 several times and have hypothesized that it has been caused by a combination of people not having insurance as the move into our age dominated by capitalist health insurance coupled with capitalist health insurance denying care. Now, I hypothesize that the shift from increasing to declining middle age death rates are caused by something causing capitalist health insurance to stop denying care. Unfortunately I also think I will never have access to data that will let me test that hypothesis. None the less, I am very happy to see this declining take place. It needs to go on for several years before the United States' middle age death rates get as low as the other economically developed countries. I will keep watching to see if it does.

Here the infant death rates are compared. Native Americans bounce around a 50% higher death rater until COVID hits when the Native American death rate ends up being almost twice as high as the non-Hispanic whites. Can you think of any thing more painful than watching your baby die?

Here is the raw data from wonder.cdc.gov
Year NH White N Amer
1999 593.1 874.5
2000 596.5 755.7
2001 574.4 833
2002 597.3 786.5
2003 587.1 758.8
2004 579.1 858.5
2005 591.1 765.6
2006 588.8 825.8
2007 588 835.9
2008 573.3 812
2009 550.7 801.3
2010 529.3 720.6
2011 521.8 737.7
2012 514.8 784.4
2013 511.5 682.2
2014 501.6 773.7
2015 494.6 732.6
2016 485.9 775
2017 458.5 723.8
2018 467.6 726.4
2019 444.6 727.1
2020 437.7 696.2
2021 465.4 722.6
2022 472.8 833.5
2023 451.1 852.4
2024 465.6 890.5

The main thing this graph shows is that state politics is related to age 0-19 death rates. The amazing thing is that the 2024 death rate in the Republican voting states was still higher than the Democrat rate was back in 1999, a quarter of a century ago!

In general all three tend to change in the same direction at the same time. All three lines wiggle about the same. The mixed party make the bad move closer to Republicans over time. In general Republicans have concentrated political advertising in mixed party states and it has succeeded in making mixed party young death rates closer to Republicans.

Here are the states by party:
Dem Mix Rep
CA AZ AL
CO GA AK
CT IA AR
DE MI FL
DC MN ID
HI NH IN
IL NC KS
ME OH KY
MD PA LA
MA TX MS
NV WI MO
NJ MT
NM NE
NY ND
OR OK
RI SC
VT SD
VA TN
WA UT
WV
WY

I am afraid that everything I tried to look at to explain this variation over time.

Southern Baptist (SB)have a history of relying on prayer for health care. The problem in trying to measure this is we do not record a dead person's religion on their death certificate. I estimated the effect of state percent S B by using regression analysis to look at the relationship between state percent Southern Baptist and age 20-64death rates with mortality data for years 1999 through 2026, shown in the above graph.
A map displaying county level data can be seen at:
https://www.usreligioncensus.org/maps2000/419.jpg
The first thing this graph shows is that the estimated S B death rate is consistently more than twice as high as the non-S B death rate. The second thing is the amount of the difference has consistently increased over time. And the third thing, that during the five COVID years, the S B death rates increased several times more than the non-S B population.

Looking at the total mortality cases for the age 20-64 population for theses 26 years finds a total 17,177,897 deaths, of with 2,819,264 were estimated S B above the non-S B population death rate. That estimates that the Southern Baptist refusing science based health care are responsible for 16.4% of our middle age death rates.

Here is the data:
Year r b Y' SB=0 Y' Spt=100%
1999 0.76 4.32 298 730
2000 0.76 4.59 298 757
2001 0.75 4.41 304 745
2002 0.76 4.69 308 777
2003 0.76 4.83 312 795
2004 0.78 5.12 303 815
2005 0.76 5.18 311 830
2006 0.75 5.20 313 832
2007 0.74 5.04 312 816
2008 0.74 5.18 313 831
2009 0.73 5.05 315 820
2010 0.73 5.13 313 825
2011 0.70 4.99 320 819
2012 0.70 5.08 319 828
2013 0.71 5.18 323 841
2014 0.71 5.37 327 864
2015 0.68 5.30 336 866
2016 0.67 5.38 344 881
2017 0.65 5.36 347 883
2018 0.66 5.38 343 881
2019 0.64 5.22 346 868
2020 0.67 6.79 400 1,079
2021 0.69 8.79 436 1,315
2022 0.63 6.44 396 1,040
2023 0.64 5.75 363 938
2024 0.65 5.41 338 878

I have just been able to get single year age death rate data for 2024 and it shows that one of the causes of unnecessary deaths that I have been unsuccessful to publish about has ended.

This graph shows the percent change in single year age deaths per 100,000 people has changed from 2023 to 2024. The great majority of the dots show very strong one year decline in death rates. Most of the increases, eight of them, are under age 12, but the higher end of that group is at the top of the good solid line of declining dots as they age to 24. The line of dots then slowly move up toward the zero line until the dot for age 70 is slightly above zero. I am not going to put the data here but this pattern of strong declines in deaths rates is just the opposite of the pattern I have showing for earlier years. More on that in a latter post, I want to get this graph out. Then in ages 75 through 81, we have some very unusual dots. In all my decades of playing with mortality data, these changes can only be due to a problem in producing the data. The couple of positives around the very strong negative for age 77 probably are unusual from a flaw in the data processing process.

Well, I could say more but I am going to go ahead and post this graph displaying a good and badly needed turn around in our death rates.

I hypothesize that this is produced by a substantial decline in health insurance companies denying care.

the death rate of the 24 year olds declined 30 percent.

The big vine in front interfered with mowing, it was a volunteer plant, probably planted by a bird pooping. I need to take more comprehensive pictures of the house.

I came up with the hypothesis that Southern Baptist have a high death rate because living in rural Alabama for almost half a century I have seen several die after using prayer for health care,

The available data are at:
https://www.thearda.com/us-religion/statistics/rankings?typ=0&u=2&cod=419
But I became suspicious when I found the last five census measures of state percent Southern Baptist are all correlated at 0.97 or stronger. As a long time available data user, that made me suspicious of the data and in pursuit of another variable, I turned to the on-line Yellow Pages and did a counting of findings with a search for phone numbers for Southern Baptist church in each of our 50 states.

The graph show the values of two correlations for each year from 1968 through 2024. I correlated the death rates for years closest to each census year with the church survey data and the 2024 Yellow Pages data. In every case, the the Yellow Pages data is more strongly related to the state age 20-64 death rates in every one of the yearly correlations.

In general I think we need to know a lot more about the Southern Baptist. I think they are a key component of the underlying politics that put Trump into power and they well may be part of the Russian underground effort to destroy the United states. If there are any ex-Southern Baptist here, I would appreciate hearing from you.

I am adding measuring the total effect if Southern Baptist on the United States high death rate to my to do list.

$The way to approach this post of four state maps is to look at the correlation for the state you are interested in and note this correlation for recent years and deaths rates then go to the second, for age 1-19, graph and make the same not then go the the age 20-64 graph and note the correlation for that age group and then go back and look at the age 65-84 map to see how recent death rates have changed there. \Here is the r's in a table to get values for unlabeled states. State r Age 0 AL -0.14 AK 0.7 AZ 0.41 AR 0.6 CA 0.28 CO 0.07 CT 0.39 DC 0.54 DE 0.09 FL -0.18 GA -0.08 HI -0.67 ID 0.08 IL -0.27 IN -0.15 IA -0.15 KS -0.31 KY 0.38 LA -0.54 ME -0.18 MD -0.52 MA -0.82 MI -0.27 MN -0.07 MS 0.61 MO 0.13 MT 0.85 NE 0.8 NV -0.12 NH -0.33 NJ -0.86 NM -0.29 NY -0.73 NC -0.27 ND -0.31 OH -0.06 OK 0.41 OR 0.58 PA -0.5 RI -0.55 SC 0.32 SD 0.55 TN -0.58 TX 0.77 UT -0.11 VT 0.01 VA 0.4 WA 0.69 WV -0.35 WI -0.3 WY -0.55$