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.
“Crack” has a little something to do with it.
crack babies
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.
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?