What distinguishes the 78-year-old candidate from the rest of the potentially dead men running is his heart attack history.
When Bernie Sanders was lying in a Las Vegas hospital after a heart attack last October, I was certain his campaign was dead. Health-wise, Sanders was already pushing his luck by bidding to become the oldest person to be elected president. Surely no voter would take a risk on a 78-year-old candidate with two stents in his heart.In a “Death and Immortality” course I teach at Boston University, one of my main objectives is to convince my students that they are going to die.
According to Tepfer, any reputable insurance company considering writing a life insurance policy is going to demand complete medical records. Sanders has been adamant that he will not provide such a history. That would immediately disqualify him for life insurance. But somehow Sanders’ Trumpish secrecy does not disqualify him as a front-runner for the Democratic presidential nomination.
The odds of this scenario are, admittedly, low. Assuming Sanders gets the nomination and assuming he is like an average heart attack victim in the AHA Journal study, the odds of him dying between winning the nomination and Nov. 3 are slim, about a 1 in 40 chance. That is not a big chance but, given the stakes, it’s too big for me.
Behavioral psychologists tell us that human beings prefer not to think probabilistically. When confronted with 20:1 odds that a septuagenarian we love will die in the next year, we convince ourselves that our beloved is one of the 19. When confronted with the fact that our favorite presidential candidate has about a 1-in-4 chance of dying within a year of his heart attack, we vote for him anyway: Death is for other people.
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