A recent study published in the journal Nature and relayed by Fast Company suggests that political opinions could have a direct impact on health. In the United States, people who identify as conservative now have significantly higher mortality rates than those who identify as liberal, revealing an unexpected and widening health gap.
Over the past decade, a health divide has gradually taken hold. If researchers have long studied the influence of factors such as income or level of education, political ideology has until now remained largely ignored as an explanatory variable.
The study is based on the analysis of individual data from long-term monitoring of a large representative sample of the American population, covering all fifty states. It highlights a marked evolution from the 2010s.
According to researcher Elizabeth Elder, the year 2010 still marks a period without notable differences between political groups. But from 2020, the gap becomes clearly visible: conservative individuals generally have a less favorable state of health than their liberal counterparts.
A very recent shift
The first signs appear in 2016 in certain biological indicators. In 2020, they are reflected concretely in the causes of death, in particular cardiovascular diseases, cancers and strokes. Between 2020 and 2022, only 0.2% of people declaring themselves “very liberal” died of internal causes, compared to 1.34% of “very conservative” people.
The authors of the study believe that this gap cannot be explained solely by the Covid-19 pandemic, nor by demographic, geographic or age differences. Rather, they point to a key factor linked in one way or another to all the others: a growing divergence in the trust placed in doctors and the health system.
This distrust has greatly increased during the pandemic, particularly around the debates on masks and vaccination – a subject that has already been very thorny for years across the Atlantic. It has since extended to other aspects of care, such as taking medication or seeking a medical consultation. However, this mistrust can have particularly serious consequences for the elderly or those suffering from chronic illnesses.
Finally, the increasing politicization of health issues seems to reinforce this phenomenon. Movements like “Make America Healthy Again” have helped spread critical discourse toward conventional medicine, fueling already entrenched skepticism. Although the study does not demonstrate a direct causal link, it highlights a clear evolution: where politics and health were not correlated in 2010, they now clearly are.
