A county’s political leanings can now predict its mortality rate because patients have lost trust in doctors who don't share their views.
April 1, 2026
Original Paper
Trust in Medicine and the Demand for Health Care *
SSRN · 6402179
The Takeaway
Since the pandemic, routine healthcare visits have dropped sharply in Republican-leaning areas, particularly when the local doctors are Democrats. This breakdown in trust is linked to a measurable 1% increase in overall mortality, demonstrating how political polarization has become a literal matter of life and death.
From the abstract
This paper studies how trust in medicine shapes health care utilization and health outcomes. I leverage the sharp partisan divergence in views of the medical profession following the Covid-19 pandemic as a shock to trust that differentially affected local areas by political orientation. I first document that since 2019, routine care utilization among Medicare beneficiaries has declined sharply in more Republican areas. By 2023, a 10 percentage point increase in a county's 2020 Republican preside