(The Center Square) – Analysis of electoral, demographic and health center data by the University of Massachusetts Amherst says gerrymandering in North Carolina has resulted in reduced access to federally qualified health centers.
The paper – Political Boundaries, Health Care Gaps: The Link Between Gerrymandering and FQHC Availability – published Thursday in the American Journal of Public Health along with an editorial.
“Access to health care should not be dependent on which party is in power,” says Auden Cote-L’Heureux, lead author of the paper. “Health care should be protected from political whims.”
The authors analyzed electoral, demographic and health center data. Federally qualified health centers are those providing primary and preventive health care services regardless of ability to pay, and the authors examined gerrymandering political maps and access to those health facilities.
If ZIP codes were split between legislative districts, the paper considered it highly gerrymandered. Research also used techniques to determine “the degree to which each individual voter is artificially ‘dislocated’ from like-minded voters, another way of measuring gerrymandering.”
“We find that ZIP codes that were more gerrymandered between 2004 and 2022 had fewer federally qualified health centers in 2022 and were less likely to gain health centers between 2004 and 2022,” Cote-L’Heureux said in a release. “In addition, those communities had fewer patients visiting those health centers in 2022.”
The authors say their paper delivers “a potentially legally sound way to contest gerrymandering” in response to the U.S. Supreme Court ruling in 2019 saying partisan gerrymandering can’t be contested because it is a “nonjusticiable political question.”
The report, in part, says, “Our study design is such that casual inferences cannot be drawn as to the effect of political representation on health care access. Indeed, some studies suggest that the effect could be in the opposite direction, and that excess mortality among minorities reduces their ability to advocate for themselves politically. Nonetheless, the negative association between FQHC availability and long-term UDM may reflect the well-established pattern that splitting socially cohesive communities decreases civic engagement and political awareness.”
UDM is an acronym for uncertainty of district membership.
The paper’s measured time is 2004 to 2022. According to the Sheps Center for Health Services Research in Chapel Hill, there have been 12 rural hospital closures in the state since 2005. Four of those were when Democrats had a trifecta in Raleigh from 2006-09, and only one (Martin General in Williamson, in 2023) has been in the last eight years.
Cote-L’Heureux did research with senior author David Chin, an assistant professor of health policy and management in the School of Public Health and Health Sciences.
UMass bills itself as a nationally ranked land-grant research university. RealClearEducation says the faculty is about 50% liberal, 17% moderate and 26% conservative.
