How Republicans poisoned the missing Americans.

Ronald Reagan is long gone, but a recent report shows how his policies and his party are still hurting us

and responsible for millions of lost years of Americans lives.

The study calls them missing Americans.

It wasn't always this way.

In the 1930s, after FDR rolled out programs to aid the homeless and unemployed

across the country. America enjoyed a longer life expectancy and more

healthy years within that life expectancy than any other wealthy nation in

the world.

While some of that was due to the public health crisis,

echoing across Europe in the wake of World War I,

it was largely because FDR's Democrats in charge of the country

were building schools and hospitals like

there was no tomorrow. Republican President Eisenhower followed in that

tradition through the 1950s and in the 1960s L.B.J. rolled out Medicare and Medicaid.

As a result, we continue to have the world's best lifespans and quality of life.

Then came Reagan's austerity and neoliberalism campaigns in 1981

and America began to become unraveled.

That study published by the National Academy of Sciences in the journal P&A's

Nexus looked at excess deaths. They called them missing Americans in

our country versus others around the world. The researchers from Boston University

School of Public Health, the University of Pennsylvania, and the Harvard Medical School and TH Chan School of Public Health found, quote,

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