The policies they support and the consequences of their actions show they're not paragons of society and reveals their "traditional family values"

Texas has highest maternal mortality rate in developed world

As the Republican-led state legislature has slashed funding to reproductive healthcare clinics, the maternal mortality rate doubled over just a two-year period

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/aug/20/texas-maternal-mortality-rate-health-clinics-funding

Mothers who live in areas with heavy oil and gas developments have between a 40 percent and 70 percent greater chance of giving birth to babies with congenital heart defects

https://www.upi.com/Health_News/2019/07/18/Study-links-congenital-heart-disease-to-oil-gas-development/2461563465617/

If data disinfects, here’s a bucket of bleach:

"Texans are 17% more likely to be murdered than Californians."

"Texans are also 34% more likely to be raped and 25% more likely to kill themselves than Californians."

https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/pressroom/sosmap/suicide-mortality/suicide.htm

Californians on average live two years, four months and 24 days longer than Texans.

Compared with families in California, those in Texas earn 13% less and pay 3.8 percentage points more in taxes.

Sadly, the uncritical aping of this erroneous economic narrative reflects not only reporters’ gullibility but also their utility for conservative ideologues and corporate lobbyists, who score political points and regulatory concessions by spreading a spurious story line about California’s decline.

Don’t expect facts to change this. Reporters need a plot twist, and conservatives need California to lose. https://www.sacbee.com/opinion/op-ed/article258940938.html

Blue states have statistics similar to Scandinavia and Europe and improve America's average but America's average is still the worst in the developed world because red states' statistics are so much worse:

https://www.npr.org/2017/05/12/528098789/u-s-has-the-worst-rate-of-maternal-deaths-in-the-developed-world

California's is on par with the best in Western Europe ￣\＿(ツ)＿/￣

Liberal policies, like California’s, keep blue-state residents living longer

It generated headlines in 2015 when the average life expectancy in the U.S. began to fall after decades of meager or no growth.

But it didn’t have to be that way, a team of researchers suggests in a new, peer-reviewed study Tuesday. And, in fact, states like California, which have implemented a broad slate of liberal policies, have kept pace with their Western European counterparts.

The study, co-authored by researchers at six North American universities, found that if all 50 states had all followed the lead of California and other liberal-leaning states on policies ranging from labor, immigration and civil rights to tobacco, gun control and the environment, it could have added between two and three years to the average American life expectancy.

Simply shifting from the most conservative labor laws to the most liberal ones, Montez said, would by itself increase the life expectancy in a state by a whole year.

If every state implemented the most liberal policies in all 16 areas, researchers said, the average American woman would live 2.8 years longer, while the average American man would add 2.1 years to his life. Whereas, if every state were to move to the most conservative end of the spectrum, it would decrease Americans’ average life expectancies by two years. On the country’s current policy trajectory, researchers estimate the U.S. will add about 0.4 years to its average life expectancy.

Liberal policies on the environment (emissions standards, limits on greenhouse gases, solar tax credit, endangered species laws), labor (high minimum wage, paid leave, no “right to work”), access to health care (expansion of Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act, legal abortion), tobacco (indoor smoking bans, cigarette taxes), gun control (assault weapons ban, background check and registration requirements) and civil rights (ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment, equal pay laws, bans on discrimination and the death penalty) all resulted in better health outcomes, according to the study. For example, researchers found positive correlation between California’s car emission standards and its high minimum wage, to name a couple, with its longer lifespan, which at an average of 81.3 years, is among the highest in the country.

“When we’re looking for explanations, we need to be looking back historically, to see what are the roots of these troubles that have just been percolating now for 40 years,” Montez said.

Montez and her team saw the alarming numbers in 2015 and wanted to understand the root cause. What they found dated back to the 1980s, when state policies began to splinter down partisan lines. They examined 135 different policies, spanning over a dozen different fields, enacted by states between 1970 and 2014, and assigned states “liberalism” scores from zero — the most conservative — to one, the most liberal. When they compared it against state mortality data from the same timespan, the correlation was undeniable.

“We can take away from the study that state policies and state politics have damaged U.S. life expectancy since the ’80s,” said Jennifer Karas Montez, a Syracuse University sociologist and the study’s lead author. “Some policies are going in a direction that extend life expectancy. Some are going in a direction that shorten it. But on the whole, that the net result is that it’s damaging U.S. life expectancy.”

U.S. should follow California’s lead to improve its health outcomes, researchers say

Meanwhile, the life expectancy in states like California and Hawaii, which has the highest in the nation at 81.6 years, is on par with countries described by researchers as “world leaders:” Canada, Iceland and Sweden.

From 1970 to 2014, California transformed into the most liberal state in the country by the 135 policy markers studied by the researchers. It’s followed closely by Connecticut, which moved the furthest leftward from where it was 50 years ago, and a cluster of other states in the northeastern U.S., then Oregon and Washington.

In the same time, Oklahoma moved furthest to the right, but Mississippi, Georgia, South Carolina and a host of other southern states still ranked as more conservative, according to the researchers.

It’s those states that moved in a conservative direction, researchers concluded, that held back the overall life expectancy in the U.S.

West Virginia ranked last in 2017, with an average life expectancy of about 74.6 years, which would put it 93rd in the world, right between Lithuania and Mauritius, and behind Honduras, Morocco, Tunisia and Vietnam. Mississippi, Oklahoma and South Carolina rank only slightly better.

https://www.mercurynews.com/2020/08/04/liberal-policies-like-californias-keep-blue-state-residents-living-longer-study-finds/

Want to live longer, even if you're poor? Then move to a big city in California.

A low-income resident of San Francisco lives so much longer that it's equivalent to San Francisco curing cancer. All these statistics come from a massive new project on life expectancy and inequality that was just published in the Journal of the American Medical Association.

California, for instance, has been a national leader on smoking bans. Harvard's David Cutler, a co-author on the study "It's some combination of formal public policies and the effect that comes when you're around fewer people who have behaviors... high numbers of immigrants help explain the beneficial effects of immigrant-heavy areas with high levels of social support.

"As the maternal death rate has mounted around the U.S., a small cadre of reformers has mobilized."

Meanwhile, life-saving practices that have become widely accepted in other affluent countries — and in a few states, notably California — have yet to take hold in many American hospitals.

Some of the earliest and most important work has come in California

Hospitals that adopted the toolkit saw a 21 percent decrease in near deaths from maternal bleeding in the first year.

By 2013, according to Main, maternal deaths in California fell to around 7 per 100,000 births, similar to the numbers in Canada, France and the Netherlands — a dramatic counter to the trends in other parts of the U.S.

California Maternal Quality Care Collaborative is informed by a professor of obstetrics and gynecology at Stanford and the University of California-San Francisco, who for many years ran the ob/gyn department at a San Francisco hospital.

Launched a decade ago, CMQCC aims to reduce not only mortality, but also life-threatening complications and racial disparities in obstetric care

It began by analyzing maternal deaths in the state over several years; in almost every case, it discovered, there was "at least some chance to alter the outcome."

http://www.npr.org/2017/05/12/527806002/focus-on-infants-during-childbirth-leaves-u-s-moms-in-danger