The health belt?


Crunching the electoral numbers in a new way
This article has a completely new way of looking at the 2004 election.

The division is somewhat arbitrary, but it works like this: if the share or employment growth devoted to healthcare is under 30%, the state is colored gold, 30-60% is azure, and over 60% is teal. Twenty-three states are colored teal, and this is dubbed the health belt.

Now, to make things interesting, let's match that up with the red/blue distinction based on the 2004 electoral map. Of the thirteen gold states, ten of them voted for Bush. Of the twelve azure states, nine of them voted for Bush. The remaining 23 states split just about evenly with Bush winning eleven.

The electoral counts are just as one sided: Bush has a 3 to 1 edge in gold state electoral votes (78 to 22), a 3 to 2 edge in the azure states (92 to 62), and lost to Kerry by a 3 to 4 ratio in the teal states (113 to 158).

It actually gets a lot more convincing if we read the footnotes. Business Week lumped together three kinds of states to produce their health belt. Due to Katrina, Louisiana actually lost both total employment and healthcare jobs, but I think it's reasonable to exclude it as a special case. Eight more of the teal states had increases in healthcare employment along with decreases in total employment. The electoral vote split in that group went more like 3 to 1 in Kerry's favor; and it is even more lopsided if we exclude Mississippi from that group since substantial parts of it were also ravaged by Katrina. That leaves fourteen health belt states with both positive job growth, but over 60% of it coming from healthcare. Here, the states split evenly between Bush and Kerry, with Bush getting two more electoral votes.

The bottom line is that Kerry only did well in states where job losses occurred, and where they could be cancelled out by healthcare employment growth.

None of this would matter if we were talking about most other large, ubiquitous industries - like, say, grocery stores. However, it is very curious given that our healthcare industry is either dominated by government spending - through Medicare, Medicaid, and hospitals subsidized with tax dollars - or by government regulation and market interference.

It's useful to ask, why precisely are people voting for Democrats in places where big investments are being made in healthcare? Let's look at some of the possibilities.

The obvious one is that this is related to an aging population. This doesn't hold much water - Florida is a gold state. So is Arizona.

A related possibility is that it is because young people are fleeing some states, leaving gray-haired healthcare consumers behind. This doesn't jibe well either - that description fits the upper Midwest - which is mostly free of teal.

A different tack might take us to lifestyle choices. Perhaps unhealthy living leads to more healthcare spending. Here we might look at the deep South for poorer health, and California for better health. This doesn't work either: California is azure, and the South is a mix with the deep South decidedly not teal.

A fourth possibility is that private investment is creating this pattern. But, it seems unlikely that managers with incentives to make profits are investing in healthcare in teal states while they simultaneously disinvest in other industries. Sorry, but that sort of behavior passes the duck test for government, not private, involvement.

Pretty fascinating stuff. But given the actions of the President and Congress over the last six years or so, I am not sure the correlation still holds.

— NeoWayland

Posted: Mon - September 25, 2006 at 04:56 AM  Tag


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