Along Lake Erie, three states show how Republican lawmakers’ decisions over decades on cigarettes and seat belts are shortening life spans.
ASHTABULA, Ohio — Mike Czup unspooled the hose to wash his hearse. It was time to pick up the body of yet another neighborSince he started working at 15 in the funeral business, Czup has seen plenty of tragedies.
A series of visuals including a map of the three Lake Erie adjacent counties, their death rates of which Ohio is the standout, and charts showing which parties controlled each state over the past four decades.That pattern held true during the coronavirus pandemic, when Ashtabula residents died of covid at far higher rates than people in Chautauqua and Erie.
The differences in state policies directly correlate to those years lost, said Jennifer Karas Montez, director of the Center for Aging and Policy Studies at Syracuse University and author of several papers that describe the connection between politics and life expectancy.sticks out — for all the wrong reasons. Roughly 1 in 5 Ohioans will die before they turn 65, according to Montez’s analysis using the state’s 2019 death rates.
“I’m not going to turn into a smoke Nazi just because I used to smoke and I don’t anymore,” Seitz said.Faced with Ashtabula’s declining life expectancy, Czup worries about what it means for his own family, especially his two adult children. He thinks about a 34-year-old he buried last fall, whom Czup once coached on a YMCA youth basketball team. The child’s parents never missed a game; decades later, they had to attend his funeral.
By 2017, California had the nation’s second-lowest mortality rates, falling behind only Minnesota; Ohio ranked 41st, according to The Post analysis., stand an hour away from Ashtabula, where the average life expectancy in 2018 was 75.1 years — nearly two years lower than the state of Ohio’s average and more than 3½ years shorter than the country’s average.
At the time, cigarette taxes were $1.60 per pack in Ohio, $2.60 in Pennsylvania and $4.35 in New York.Note: People ages 35 to 64. Tax as of 2023, death rates from 2019.Not surprisingly, experts said, Ohio’s smoking rate exceeds that of nearby states with stricter tobacco measures.
Ashtabula residents are twice as likely to die of motor vehicle accidents than people in nearby Chautauqua, N.Y., according to a Washington Post analysis. warned that lawmakers were raiding the tobacco fund to pay for other priorities. When the global economic downturn hit the state in 2008, sparking layoffs and a government budget crunch, Ohio Gov.
to 25 percent in 2011, according to the CDC. The state now has one of the highest smoking rates in the country.Dina Coates at the grave of Steve Williams, her boyfriend who died of lung cancer, in Conneaut, Ohio. He takes the same care with the dead — which is why he had grabbed a photo from the home of a 64-year-old man whose body he picked up on a recent morning, an image of him coaching two of his sons in football, long before cancer withered his body away.He carefully injected filler in the man’s face to put the weight back on him so that his family would remember him as the man in the photo.
Johnson says it bothers her that state legislators take money from tobacco companies, which continue to profit even as many of their customers suffer and die. Her second cousin wrote to tobacco companies and scolded them for sending cigarette coupons to her mother, who died of smoking-related lung cancer. But that kind of advocacy is not in Johnson’s nature, she said.After factories shuttered in recent decades, few new industries appeared to fill the void in Ashtabula County.
Ohio’s tobacco tax has been raised just once since 2005. Public health experts say the state’s relatively lowIn contrast, Pennsylvania’s middle-of-the-pack smoking rate matched its life expectancy ranking, and New York — Public health experts in Ohio lament that they’re outgunned by Big Tobacco and its coalition of convenience store and other business owners fighting tax hikes on the grounds they would cost jobs and raise prices.
Asked if that had an impact on his policies, the GOP lawmaker said they donated to him because they know counties ringing Lake Erie, but somewhat better outcomes, in part because of the choices state politicians made.some of Pennsylvania’s more aggressive policies toward smoking cessation. Pennsylvania has spent nearly
In one of Erie’s poorest areas, where residents shop for food in dollar stores and gas stations, volunteers turn blighted blocks into community gardens. Elizabeth Kidder, medical director of a safety net clinic in New York, sees the effect state policies can have on county residents. $102 per person on public health annually in the years before the pandemic, more than double the $43 per person that Ohio spent, according to an
cities from imposing stricter tobacco regulations, before DeWine vetoed the legislation in January and nixed a similar measure in July.is part of the existential battle over the direction of the state.
Malaysia Latest News, Malaysia Headlines
Similar News:You can also read news stories similar to this one that we have collected from other news sources.
How red-state politics are shaving years off American livesAlong Lake Erie, three states show how Republican lawmakers’ decisions over decades on cigarettes and seat belts are shortening life spans.
Read more »
Man who shot at officer during West Valley City traffic stop pleads guilty to felony chargesThe Salt Lake Tribune breaking news in Utah, Salt Lake City and the surrounding area.
Read more »
Former news anchor Kari Lake files for Senate run in ArizonaLake, an outspoken Trump supporter, has filed to run as a Republican.
Read more »
Former Erie officer pleads guilty to forgeryJoseph Watts-Johnson was accused of lying about prior military service on his police department application and during the interview process.
Read more »
Inland port proposes wetland protections near Great Salt LakeThe Utah Inland Port Authority is proposing dedicating some of its funding and land mass in Salt Lake City to wetland preservation along the Great Salt Lake.
Read more »
One Colorado Republican joins state’s Democratic members of Congress to help oust McCarthy as speakerOne Republican joined all of Colorado’s Democratic U.S. House members in voting Tuesday for the successful ouster of Speaker Kevin McCarthy — a first in congressional history.
Read more »