Posted on 08/23/2009 5:54:24 AM PDT by Kaslin
he American medical system has the latest technology, the greatest variety of new drugs and unparalleled resources. But anyone who thinks we're getting something great for our dollars inevitably encounters a two-word rebuke: infant mortality.
The United States is the richest nation on Earth, but it comes in 29th in the world in survival rates among babies. This mediocre ranking is supposed to make an irrefutable case for health care reform. If we cared enough to insure everyone, we are told, we would soon rise to the health standards of other modern nations. It's just a matter of getting over our weird resistance to a bigger government role in medical care.
But not every health issue is a health care issue. The reason boxers are unusually prone to concussions is not that they lack medical insurance. Doctors may treat head injuries, but it's a lot easier to prevent them. Absent prevention, we shouldn't blame the medical industry for punch-drunk fighters.
Like life expectancy (the subject of a previous column), infant mortality is a function of many factors. The more you look at the problem, the less it seems to be correctable by a big new federal role in medical insurance -- and, in fact, the less it seems to be mainly a medical issue at all.
No one denies the problem. Our infant mortality rate is double that of Japan or Sweden. But we live different lives, on average, than people in those places. We suffer more obesity (about 10 times as much as the Japanese), and we have more births to teenagers (seven times more than the Swedes). Nearly 40 percent of American babies are born to unwed mothers.
(Excerpt) Read more at townhall.com ...
yes, but different countries start counting an infant as being “alive” at different ages. I was listening to talk radio one day and don’t recall who, but they were saying you can’t compare our infant mortality rate because certain countries don’t really start counting an infant as a person until 6 months or 1 year etc. etc. so that IF a baby dies in their country at 3 days or a week or ? , then it doesn’t “count” since they weren’t counted “yet”. I don’t recall the exact other countries that were discussed that morning but that it wasn’t a valid argument.
OTOH, we count all births here, whether born with a treatable condition or far beyond what nature could allow, including deliberate acts by parents. In any case, our system is predisposed to fight for life in nearly every case, even those with little to no chance.
It certainly would have an effect on our stats. My memory may be playing tricks because I can't remember where I heard this.
My memory feels a little less ‘left out’. ;)
“Crack” has a little something to do with it.
:) Depending on when I’m in the car, I listen to Boortz, Rush, Hannity & Levin plus all their sit-in subs . . . so sometimes hard to remember where I heard something. But I agree with you, not a valid comparison and to put us at 29 on the list.
Infant Mortality Myths and Mantras
Michael Arnold Glueck, M.D., and Robert J. Cihak, M.D., The Medicine Men
Thursday, March 10, 2005
Statistics, even at their best, don’t tell a whole story. In fact, numbers don’t tell any story at all. Data passively await analysis by people who may ignore or distort them, and who may, or may not, make appropriate inferences based on them. This can cause an empirical forest to be lost in the data-point trees.
Story Continues Below
A variety of people use the same medical statistics to tell their own stories or create their own myths.
Take infant mortality statistics. The officially reported U.S. infant mortality rate has been indisputably high compared with similarly industrialized countries since at least the 1920s.
That fact has led to a widely accepted conclusion among public health professionals in the U.S. that these rates are “caused” by poorly distributed health-care resources and can be “solved” by adopting a socialized government-paid system of health care.
We heartily disagree.
Let’s look at the numbers.
While comparing statistics among countries can be tricky, in the case of infant mortality figures, the comparisons are downright treacherous. For starters, different countries count differently.
According to the World Health Organization (WHO) definition, all babies showing any signs of life, such as muscle activity, a gasp for breath or a heartbeat, should be included as a live birth. The U.S. strictly follows this definition. But many other countries do not.
Switzerland, for instance, doesn’t count the deaths of babies shorter than 30 cm, because they are not counted as live births, according to Nicholas Eberstadt, Ph.D., Henry Wendt Scholar in Political Economy at the American Enterprise Institute and formerly a Visiting Fellow at the Harvard University Center for Population and Developmental Studies. So, comparing the 1998 infant mortality rates for Switzerland and the U.S., 4.8 and 7.2 per 1,000 births, respectively, is comparing apples and oranges.
Other countries, such as Italy, use different definitions in various parts of their own countries. Eberstadt observes that “underreporting also seems apparent in the proportion of infant deaths different countries report for the first twenty-four hours after birth. In Australia, Canada, and the United States, over one-third of all infant deaths are reported to take place in the first day. ...” In contrast, “Less than one-sixth of France’s infant deaths are reported to occur in the first day of life. In Hong Kong, such deaths account for only one-twenty-fifth of all infant deaths.”
A UNICEF press release noted: “Under the Soviet era definition ... infants who are born at less than 28 weeks, weighing less than 1,000 grams or measuring less than 35 centimeters are not counted as live births if they die within seven days. This Soviet definition still predominates in many [formerly Soviet] CIS countries.”
The release also points out: “The communist system stressed the need to keep infant mortality low, and hospitals and medical staff faced penalties if they reported increases in infant deaths. As a result, they sometimes reported the deaths of babies in their care as miscarriages or stillbirths.”
Since the United States generally uses the WHO definition of live birth, economist John Goodman and others in their 2004 book, “Lives at Risk,” conclude, “Taking into account such data-reporting differences, the rates of low-birth-weight babies born in America are about the same as other developed countries in the OECD [Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development].” Likewise, infant mortality rates, adjusted for the distribution of newborns by weight, are about the same.
American advances in medical treatment now make it possible to save babies who would surely have died only a few decades ago. Until recently, very-low-birth-weight babies, those weighing less than 3 pounds, almost always died. Now some of these babies survive with the help of breathing assistance and other recent inventions.
While such vulnerable babies may live with advanced medical assistance and technology, low-birth-weight babies (weighing less than 5.5 pounds) recently had an infant mortality rate 20 times higher than heavier babies, according to the WHO. And these deaths count as infant deaths even though most would have been counted as stillbirths if they hadn’t received the gift of life, however transitory.
Ironically, American doctors’ ability to save babies’ lives causes higher infant mortality numbers here than would be the case with less advanced medical treatment.
Because of varying standards, international comparisons of infant mortality rates are improperly used to create myths about how the United States should allocate local or national resources. If we want to lower our infant mortality rate so it compares better with that of other countries, maybe we should bring our measuring into line with theirs to better determine the actual extent of the so-called “problem.”
Enhancing the survival and well-being of our babies is vital and important. More government interference in medicine will only subject them to the unhealthy, malarious swamps of socialism – infant mortality myths notwithstanding.
http://archive.newsmax.com/archives/articles/2005/3/9/184540.shtml
Any child with a birth defect is destroyed by government order in Cuba. They’re not counted either.
We also take action to save premature infants other nations would just let die and count as stillbirths, which makes our official rate look worse.
crack babies
what you posted is the real story on infant mortality, different ways of measuring it. Here is an article comparing US to Cuba:
http://www.overpopulation.com/articles/2002/cuba-vs-the-united-states-on-infant-mortality/
The United States is the richest nation on Earth, but it comes in 29th in the world in survival rates among babies. This mediocre ranking is supposed to make an irrefutable case for health care reform. If we cared enough to insure everyone, we are told, we would soon rise to the health standards of other modern nations. It's just a matter of getting over our weird resistance to a bigger government role in medical care.. . . So why does our infant mortality rate exceed that of, say, Canada, where health care is free at the point of service? One reason is that we have a lot more tiny newborns. But underweight babies don't fare worse here than in Canada -- quite the contrary. The NBER paper points out that among the smallest infants, survival rates are better on this side of the border. What that suggests is that if we lived under the Canadian health care system, we would not have a lower rate of infant mortality. We would have a higher one. A lot of things could be done to keep babies from dying in this country. But the health care "reform" being pushed in Washington is not one of them.
IOW, if you control for the birth weight of the babies when evaluating outcomes it would be more apparent that our being an American does not automatically make health care professionals inept or greedy.
Thanks for posting that...
Yes, some of the statistics don’t include childhood diseases when calculating average lifespans either. It is a given in many countries that many children will die young from malnutrition, malaria, measles etc, and all those preventable deaths are not included in the statistics. Hence the common claims that the US is way down the list in healthcare quality. Such statistics are useful tools for useful idiots.
In the MMWR publication a few weeks ago, there was an article where the mortality of black infants in a particular town was analysed, because it was almost the same as the mortality rate of other races (historically, blacks have a higher mortality rate).
One of the interesting statistics they looked at was previous abortions by the mother. Apparently, previous abortion is a high risk factor for subsequent infant mortality, higher than smoking and one or two other risk factors I don’t recall right now, that are typically considered high risk.
I suspect under Obamacare, the extraordiunary lengths we go to for care for premature infants and multiple births will cease. Years ago when I paid medical claims for a large insurance carrier, pre-mature baby medical bills were among the highest we would receive. They would knock a whole group’s insurance premium for a loop.
taxpayer subsidized abortion will do wonders for the infant mortality rate here, won’t it?
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