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This scorecard assesses how well the health system works for women, measuring performance in outcomes, quality, prevention, coverage, access
Massachusetts, Vermont, and Rhode Island top the overall rankings of health performance for women
Behold the evidence of conservative governance on the lives and well-being of women.
Much more at the link.
Movie depictions of human sacrifice are usually pretty straightforward: There’s an altar. There’s a knife. Sometimes the scenes take place o
"But during the COVID-19 pandemic, Americans witnessed an actual mass human sacrifice that came with a different kind of ceremony and distinctive ritual chants. Those ceremonies took place in red state governors’ offices and the chants intoned “freedom” as these elected officials fought against closing schools, blocked mask mandates, and belittled the effectiveness of vaccines.
According to a paper published this week in the Journal of the American Medical Association, an enormous number of Americans died unnecessarily during the COVID-19 pandemic. Those deaths can’t be laid at the feet of Donald Trump for his diminishment of the threat and mishandling of the consequences. This tragic phenomenon was more local.
As many as one-quarter of a million Americans died simply because their state governments refused to impose good public health standards. They died as appeasements to the twin gods of ignorance and politics."
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Relatedly, recall this research:
The researchers found, if left-leaning policies were implemented nationwide, they may have saved 171,030 lives in 2019.
"Working-age people living in states governed largely with conservative policies are more likely to die early than people in states with more left-leaning policies, a new study finds, corroborating observations and theories that left-wing political commentators have maintained for years.
The study, published this week in PLOS ONE, analyzed a wide swath of policies relating to the criminal legal system, health care, taxes, climate and the environment, firearms, and labor, rating them between a 0 and 1 scale, where zero is the maximum conservative score and one is the maximum left-leaning score. They compared those policies with mortality rates in a 20-year span between 1999 and 2019.
The authors found that the rate of death among people between 25 and 64 in states with predominantly conservative policies was higher than in states with predominantly liberal policies. In nearly every policy area that the authors analyzed, left-leaning policies were associated with a lower rate of death."
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The Commonwealth Fund 2023 Scorecard ranks states’ health care systems based on how well they provide high-quality, accessible, and equitabl
More at the link.
We provide decision-makers and everyday citizens with the very best data on the social and environmental health of their societies and help
Given the resources of the US, we could be at the top of this list. But due to a variety of historical factors, the US is not even among the world's most developed countries.
The Social Progress Index categorizes country performance into 5 tiers. Ranked at 29, the US languishes in tier 2:
"America is in decline" is a refrain on both right and left, and with this progress index there's evidence to substantiate it.
Disagreement exists of course on the causes and definitions of decline and progress, but it's worth noting how seldom measures of social well-being get mentioned in conservative political discourse or become the basis of public policy. Certainly this is the major component of why the US performs so poorly relative to its potential: One of the US's two major political parties and the social formations on which it's based is ideologically bound to traditionalist sociocultural values that generate lower levels of social development.
(For the research that links values to socioeconomic development, see World Values Survey.)
Religiosity, traditional values, family, flag patriotism, national pride, etc., - generate only marginal relevance to human well-being in terms of public policy.
This is one explanation anyway for the US's relatively poor performance on this well-being index.
America's history of racism also plays a large role, in that racist belief historically correlates with rejection of social policies that might benefit people of color.
The legacies of racism, religiosity and social conservatism are still extant in political belief and practice, with predictable results:
(Darker blue represents higher well-being scores, lighter green represents lower measured well-being.)
The U.S. does a surprisingly poor job of protecting its children. Over a quarter million children have been married in the U.S. in the last
The U.S. does a surprisingly poor job of protecting its children. Over a quarter million children have been married in the U.S. in the last two decades, even though we know that child marriage has deeply harmful consequences. Additionally, 160,000 children experience physical punishment in U.S. schools each year. Thousands of children have been condemned to die in prison through life without parole sentences. And children are exposed to dangerous conditions while working in agriculture, sometimes with deadly consequences. The U.S. is the only country in the world that has failed to ratify the Convention on the Rights of the Child, the most widely ratified human rights treaty in history. The treaty addresses children's rights to education, health, protection from violence and exploitation, and a broad array of other rights. Ratification would require the U.S. to strengthen its protection of children. But in the U.S., many of these rights are left up to individual states, not the federal government. Last year, Human Rights Watch published a scorecard that measured U.S. state compliance with key children's rights established in international law. We looked at child marriage, corporal punishment, child labor, and juvenile justice because these key measures can affect a child for the rest of their lives. Not a single U.S. state got an A or B when assessed on these issues. Only four states—New Jersey, Ohio, Iowa, and Minnesota—managed a C grade. Every other state got a D or F. We just updated that scorecard, and are pleased to report marginal improvement. Over the past year, Alaska and West Virginia enacted laws to limit child marriage, and Connecticut and Vermont fully banned the practice. New York and New Hampshire raised the minimum age of juvenile jurisdiction closer to the international standard of 14. New Mexico, Illinois, and Minnesota banned sentencing children to life without parole. And Colorado and Maryland banned corporal punishment in certain school settings. In all, 11 states enacted positive reforms over the past year.
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Meanwhile, in Florida:
