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World Infant mortality rates

You need to be reminded that there is far more to analysis than simply accepting statistics at face value. On the linked page, Czech Republic, Iceland, Leichenstein, Luxembourg, Malta, Singapore, and Slovenia all top the US in Infant mortality, but no one in their right mind believes that the health care in those places is better than US healthcare.

There's a reason that this statistic is misleading, and as I posted before, the reason lies in the way that the definitions are made. "Infant mortality" is defined as the number of deaths of children under 12 months per 1000 live births. For the non-analytically-minded, this is a straight-forward statistic, since they do not consider the differences between the nations themselves. Those above nations have low infant mortality rates most likely because sickly fetuses simply do not survive gestation or the birthing process. In the US, we rescue 16-week-old cocaine-addicted fetuses and actually try to make them viable. Those that do not make it to their first birthday bring down our infant mortality rate. In almost any other nation, they would never have been encouraged to survive to become a statistic. Our exceedingly wonderful medical science community directly contributes to our statistic's "poor" ranking. Of course, this ranking is in the top 10% worldwide, and within three-tenths of one percent of all births of being #1... yet this somehow becomes a "crisis" thanks to those who parrot these numbers without any cogent analytical thinking, implying that we need to be more like Singapore, Slovenia, and/or the Czech Republic for some strange reason. This kind of point-blank substitution of statistical citation for thoughtful analysis is what I dislike.

"You need to be reminded that there is far more to analysis than simply accepting statistics at face value."

"Those above nations have low infant mortality
rates most likely because sickly fetuses simply do not survive gestation or the birthing process."

Agreed. You make some very interesting points in your response, and granted, it does take away much of the credibility of infant mortality statistics. But you have not replaced the data whose credibility you reduced with any facts and data of your own. Your ideas are good, and you may be correct in your assumptions but we don't know that yet, because you haven't presented any facts.

So, Teacher, I will remind you that reasoned arguments are no substitute for facts. Your arguments are good, and if you choose to believe them in the absence of data, that's fine, but you can't expect others to accept them blindly without data.

Here's some relevant data on longevity that you might find interesting w.r.t. U.S. healthcare. This is more significant IMHO than the infant mortality rates, because even though we are only 4.1 years behind Japan, that represents a significant number of deaths. Also, if you take out Japan's suicide rate (one of the highest in the world) then the gap between us and Japan is even larger.

"The United States ranks 17th in average life expectancy on a list of 33 developed nations, while Japan holds the lead, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control reported yesterday.
The average U.S. life expectancy of 75 years trails Japan's life expectancy by 4.1 years, but beats the lowest of the group, Hungary, by more than five years. The average Hungarian lives 69.7 years, the CDC said.

"The United States also ranked near the middle of the 32 nations in death rates from all causes; 828.4 deaths are reported in the United States for each 100,000 people each year. Japan was best at 628.8, and Romania was worst at 1,242.

"The leading cause of death in the United States, heart disease, hits harder here than in other countries. The U.S. mortality rate from heart disease was 382 per 100,000 per year for men and 214 for women, compared with 339 and 206 in the other 32 developed countries.

"Throughout the 33 countries, heart disease accounted for 30 percent of all deaths, with cancer causing 21 percent and stroke causing 14 percent."