Death by the Numbers

Who is John Galt ^ | 09/09/09 | "John Galt"

[cpurick]

You've no doubt heard about how everyone else's healthcare is better than ours. This excellent Daily Mail article explains the advanced science behind the UK's superior infant mortality statistics. The trick is to not count the ones your doctors never work on.

Your math teacher was right all along, kids. As it turns out, good mathematics can solve any problem. And in this case, as Ezekiel Emanuel would say, the key to good healthcare is to allocate scarce resources where they will do the most good. Society can't waste precious live-saving care on long shots. We need to be more efficient than that.

For the money the UK might have spent trying to save this poor baby, they were able to give out free birth control to an entire county for a year, and even three or four breast augmentations to help teenage girls with crippling self-esteem issues. Now that's the way to ration correctly.

Let's look at how the profit model would have rationed care in this case, shall we?

[The Great RJ]

This is simply applying military type triage to civilian life. In times of war, battlefield wounded who have little chance of survival are not immediately evacuated to field hospitals to save resources for those who have better chances of survival. However, using this same concept in a civilian context and especially in treating premature infants is barbaric. My son, who recently graduated magna cum laude from law school, was born premature and under these UK guidelines may not have been treated.

[Constitutionalist Conservative]

From the Daily Mail article:

She was shocked to discover that another child, born in the U.S. at 21 weeks and six days into her mother's pregnancy, had survived.

That'll never happen again in Obama's America.

[DrC]

Leaving aside that the U.S. counts infant deaths that other countries do not, the only reason the U.S. has “worse” infant mortality statistics than other countries is that we have a higher rate of low birthweight infants—a rate that is driven far more by social factors (e.g., poverty) and lifestyle factors (e.g., drug abuse) than medical care quality. When the U.S. is compared to other countries on an apples-to-apples basis, i.e., taking into account birthweight, our infant mortality rates are substantially lower than in countries such as Japan and Norway.
See Table 2-6 at http://books.google.com/books?id=HmAtKsSvI7gC&pg=PA54&lpg=PA54&dq=fetal+mortality+rates+by+birthweight+norway&source=bl&ots=ErbC0gp8xf&sig=HfrXbvq9zOZMxCReDJDpds6XPr4&hl=en&ei=sq2nSsAqj6W2B5DUjZ4I&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=6#v=onepage&q=fetal%20mortality%20rates%20by%20birthweight%20norway&f=false