Trying to wrap my head around the numbers. 9/11 killed some 3,000, with a few more isolated incidents in the years since then adding to the total.
What about Republican policy? Inadequate healthcare, the death penalty, militarized law enforcement, gun control, immigration deaths, air pollution, insufficient nutrition, homelessness, climate change, anti-vaccinations… how many Americans are killed by those every year?
Trying to keep this GQ… good luck :dubious:
No way in hell. 
Off to Great Debates.
Colibri
General Questions Moderator
Deaths due to lack of healthcare: studies say 26,000 per year or 45,000 per year, and I’m sure other studies say other numbers. A lot, anyway.
I would query your addition of anti-vax to the list … that seems to be cross-political nuttery as far as I can tell
Homelessness is also probably a bi-partisan failure.
Hell, it is poisoned even for GD. If a homeless guy dies, how did the Republican party kill him?
Probably not with kindness. Budget cuts, I’ll say - machete-deep slashes to a tattered “safety net”. You know the GOP health plan: Don’t Get Sick. Austerity programs world-wide kill people. In the US, cutting preventative care and affordable housing kills people. Ethnic discrimination kills people. A party backing such shit kills people. Hi there, GOP!
At best, I suppose one could do a comparative study between the United States and Canada and try to control for political differences to see the effect on poverty- and health-care-inadequacy preventable deaths.
This should probably be divided into two categories: ***Direct ***deaths and ***indirect ***deaths.
Terrorists, such as al-Qaeda on 9/11, kill their victims pretty directly. The 2,000+ people who burned to death, or jumped to their death, or got rammed by the plane impact, were directly terrorist-caused deaths.
If Republicans oppose Obamacare, though, and that indirectly leads to this or that ripple effect that prevents some lives from being saved, that is an indirect death; ditto for climate-change deaths.
That being said, if the OP is counting since the year 2001, then yes, perhaps more Republican actions led to deaths since the number of U.S. soldier deaths since 2001 in Iraq and Afghanistan and elsewhere has surpassed 3,000. In addition, Republican states also execute some condemned people, although that number is much smaller.
Spending on indigent healthcare, social welfare, and housing programs have increased every year since they have been enacted. Ethnic discrimination is illegal at all levels of government and in the private sector. Is it your contention that anyone who is not in favor of more, more and more of that ad infinitum (because anything less won’t be enough for someone) is guilty of killing people?
Because that seems to be the implication of the OP.
Going with the flow of this thread, how many Americans did the Dems kill in Vietnam? How many Americans did Bill Clinton kill with his very public McDonalds habit? Or Mr Obama and his tobacco addiction?
My only conclusion is that American politicians are genocidal mass murderers. The horror. 
I have a hard time equating deaths caused by inaction with deaths caused directly. If you insist on comparing the two, then you should attribute a lot of indirect deaths to terrorists in addition to the people they killed directly. For example, if Al Qaeda hadn’t attacked the United States on 9/11, the United States wouldn’t have invaded Afghanistan. So we could count the approximately 100,000 people who have died as a result of the Afghanistan war as deaths caused by terrorists.
Wait: so you’re saying that was the start of it all? That the terrorists, without provocation, just attacked the largest, most powerful country on the planet?
It’s an issue with capitalism/landlords itself, really.
Your point is valid, but it leads to rabbit-holes too deep.
In 1951 Iran elected the secular democrat Mohammad Mosaddegh as its President. This would have completely changed the trajectory of the entire Middle East, but Mosaddegh was overthrown in a CIA-sponsored coup d’état. Should we blame many millions of death on President D.D. Eisenhower? Actually the entire past century results from the action of Gavrilo Princip who killed an Austrian Archduke in Sarajevo on June 28, 1914.
Closer to the present, the U.S. commits suicide at a higher rate than other developed countries — 19,000 extra suicide deaths annually compared with the U.K. per capita rate. But even an avid partisan like myself would find it hard to attribute all of these suicides to Republican misbehavior.
Republican sabotage of Obamacare has already cost several thousands of lives, so answering ‘Yes’ to OP is a no-brainer. But even that can lead to debate. In the early 1970’s Congress voted on plans with GOP support that went as far or further than Obamacare decades later, but D’s voted No because those plans didn’t go far enough!
I mean, Reagan more or less nuked y’alls mental health care system from orbit, and I’m not really sure it has recovered since. So there is that.
Also a lot of the suicidal angst has to do with a) climate grief (that’s pretty much squarely on the “global warming is a hoax ! burn more coal !” and all the “fuck y’all millenials, I got mine and I’m gonna die alone, unloved, unmourned” boomers in power, in the US and abroad but mostly on the right) b) absurd wealth disparities and the utter hopelessness of the poor and lower middle class ; also students saddled with uni debts who can’t get anything better than unpaid internships at Amazon because fuck unions and c) coming back from the wars ; at least one of which falls squarely on Republican deliberate warmongering (with another upcoming).
That doesn’t cover the entire increase, maybe ; but who in their right mind would ever claim Republicans have made living in America better in any way, shape or form ?
I am also going to say the link between “Republican policy” and all of the above is too fuzzy to present a hard number. Even something like calculating the number of deaths due to gun control policy requires me to abandon hard statistics - if you had asked for the number of deaths from gunshot wounds, we could talk about numbers.
Another example, it is not clear what you mean by inadequate healthcare and I doubt such a thing as “death due to inadequate healthcare” is going to have a credible statistic. Death by homicide or negligence in healthcare settings, perhaps.
Even something like death by malnutrition isn’t clear. Malnutrition is rarely the direct cause of death - that would be starvation. I would expect malnutrition contributes to the severity of other more deadly things like diarrhea.
~Max
Some GOP state governments have explicitly prevented their citizens from getting Obamacare; these citizens remain uninsured. I think you can find statistics comparing mortality between insured and uninsured.
No. My point is that the OP was making an apples and oranges comparison.
According to healthcare.gov you can enroll in “affordable, quality health coverage” “no matter what state you live in”.
I’m not terribly familiar with the workings of Obamacare since I get my insurance through work. If you give me a list of states, I can try and find out how many uninsured people died.
~Max
I don’t see where he said that.