Life expectancy gap in NC reveals lack of trust

Editorial by Fayetteville Observer,  June 12, 2017.

If you are born and raised in North Carolina, chances are that you aren’t going to live as long as the average American.

That fact — not the alternative kind, but the real deal — emerged in data reported in the journal JAMA Internal Medicine and was highlighted in a chart on the website fivethirtyeight.com.

North Carolina joins virtually the entire South in lagging behind the national averages for life expectancy.

This one statistic goes far in helping us understand the appeal of political newcomer Donald Trump to many North Carolina voters. They may not have known about the life expectancy gap, but they could feel in their daily lives that they had been shortchanged of their share of the American Dream.

Key factors in determining how healthy people are, and how long they will live, are financial stability, education and access to health care. In many rural areas of the state, all three are below par. The people in these communities can rightfully assume that their government — whether it is on the local, state or national level — has failed them. They aren’t likely to put much faith in those whom they see as political elites, on either side of the aisle, who have for years been running a system that has not worked to their benefit.

They may not always see a clear target for their disgust, whether it is the Democratic administration that pushed through the textile-job-destroying NAFTA legislation or the Republican legislature that turned away the chance for the poorest in their communities to access health care through Medicaid expansion.

But in 2016, many of them saw a clear source of hope in Trump, an anti-candidate who said he cared about their lives and promised to shake up the institutions in which their belief was wavering.

Our point here, though, is not to concoct an explanation for the election of a political novice to the nation’s top position, but to affirm the legitimacy of the dissatisfaction among those residents of the state who feel they have been forgotten.

NAFTA may be good policy for the nation, but we quietly let the workers in St. Pauls pay the price in the loss of thousands of jobs. The decision to forgo the Medicaid expansion made political sense for a Republican Party that wanted to avoid giving President Obama any kind of North Carolina victory, but it cost as many as a half million state residents access to higher-quality health care that could expand their prospects and extend their lives.

Improving health care, education and economic prospects in rural communities is not easy. It is easier to distract these voters from the issues that most impact their lives by tossing out the red meat of divisive social issues than to do the hard work of building a state political system that aims to lower barriers to success in troubled sections of the state.

Republicans and Democrats alike are guilty of the failures that keep North Carolina lagging behind in life expectancy. In the future, though, both parties had best be aware that Trump may have awakened something in the state’s downtrodden voters that will prompt them to demand real results, not just big political talk, from their leaders in the future.

http://www.fayobserver.com/news/20170612/our-view-life-expectancy-gap-in-north-carolina-reveals-lack-of-trust