"Our infant mortality rate is a national embarrassment"

[applegrove]

Our infant mortality rate is a national embarrassment

By Christopher Ingraham at the Washington Post

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2014/09/29/our-infant-mortality-rate-is-a-national-embarrassment/

"SNIP........................


In fact, infant mortality rates among wealthy Americans are similar to the mortality rates among wealthy Fins and Austrians. The difference is that in Finland and Austria, poor babies are nearly as likely to survive their first years as wealthy ones. In the U.S. - land of opportunity - that is starkly not the case: "there is tremendous inequality in the US, with lower education groups, unmarried and African-American women having much higher infant mortality rates," the authors conclude.

One way of understanding these numbers is by noting that most American babies, regardless of socio-economic status, are born in hospitals. And while in the hospital, American infants receive exceedingly good care - our neo-natal intensive care units are among the best in the world. This may explain why mortality rates in the first few weeks of life are similar in the U.S., Finland and Austria.

But the differences arise after infants are sent home. Poor American families have considerably less access to quality healthcare as their wealthier counterparts.

One measure of the Affordable Care Act's success, then, will be whether it leads to improvements in the infant mortality rate. Oster and her colleagues note that Obamacare contains provisions to expand post-natal home nurse visits, which are fairly common in Europe.


........................SNIP"

[catbyte]

1. This is infuriating. Fetuses are "God's Precious Miracles" just as long as moms don't need adequate

prenatal care through Medicaid. Despicable bagger hypocrites. This proves that baggers don't give a damn about children. It's all about control and punishing so-called "floozies".

[Cleita]

2. I did a report on this for my local Dem club ten years ago when

we trying to come up with reasons why we needed national health care. It was one of the indicators that placed our health care close to those of banana republics. Nothing got better in those ten years because mostly those who could do something about it didn't. Hopefully the ACA may make this statistic somewhat better, however, we really need Medicare for everyone to put us in the same league as the advanced social democracies.