The Truth About Health Care and Infant Mortality - Lack of access to health care does not explain...

Reason ^ | August 24, 2009 | Steve Chapman

[gimme1ibertee]

Lack of access to health care does not explain America's infant mortality rate

No,i'd say rampant abortion would account for America's infant mortality rate.

[Sigurdrifta]

People also need to look VERY carefully at how this infant mortality statistic is computed in different countries.

[traderrob6]

Scientific Method, stats, and the lies they propagate...

http://exposingtheleft.blogspot.com/2007/08/scientific-method.html

[JasonC]

Drug offense rate in the US is 80% higher than in Canada. Everyone has the out of wedlock birth epidemic by now, but not everyone has the rest of the disfunctional underclass culture we do.

[freespirited]

African-American babies are far more likely to die than white ones, which is often taken as evidence that poverty and lack of health insurance are to blame.

Some years back there was a study of pregnancy outcomes among female soldiers. All had identical prenatal care. The black soldiers still had worse pregnancy outcomes. It's just a fact of life and no one is to blame, except perhaps Mama Nature.

Sorry Reverend Al.

[Wuli]

As usual, where liberals error when it come to science, or even “statistical studies”, they miss the fact that correlation is not causation.

[justkate]

"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.

Here's another reason:

"The reliability of the neonatal mortality estimates depends on accuracy and completeness of reporting and recording of births and deaths. Underreporting and misclassification are common, especially for deaths occurring early on in life."

"Misclassification", btw, includes live births which are reported as stillborn b/c the baby dies...after receiving no medical intervention.

http://www.who.int/healthinfo/statistics/indneonatalmortality/en/

[Ditto]

A 'diverse' population as they say is one factor in causing diferences in rates but another major contributor is the way in which Infant Mortality is mostly under reported in other countries vs how it is reported in the US is another major factor.

The main problem is inconsistent measurement across nations. The United Nations Statistics Division, which collects data on infant mortality, stipulates that an infant, once it is removed from its mother and then "breathes or shows any other evidence of life such as beating of the heart, pulsation of the umbilical cord, or definite movement of voluntary muscles... is considered live-born regardless of gestational age."16 While the U.S. follows that definition, many other nations do not. Demographer Nicholas Eberstadt notes that in Switzerland "an infant must be at least 30 centimeters long at birth to be counted as living."17 This excludes many of the most vulnerable infants from Switzerland's infant mortality measure. Switzerland is far from the only nation to have peculiarities in its measure. Italy has at least three different definitions for infant deaths in different regions of the nation.18 The United Nations Statistics Division notes many other differences.19 Japan counts only births to Japanese nationals living in Japan, not abroad. Finland, France and Norway, by contrast, do count births to nationals living outside of the country. Belgium includes births to its armed forces living outside Belgium but not births to foreign armed forces living in Belgium. Finally, Canada counts births to Canadians living in the U.S., but not Americans living in Canada. In short, many nations count births that are in no way an indication of the efficacy of their own health care systems.

The United Nations Statistics Division explains another factor hampering consistent measurement across nations:

"...some infant deaths are tabulated by date of registration and not by date of occurrence... Whenever the lag between the date of occurrence and date of registration is prolonged and therefore, a large proportion of the infant-death registrations are delayed, infant-death statistics for any given year may be seriously affected."

Source: National Center for Policy Research

I.E. in some nations, infant deaths are simply never reported because a 'live birth' was never reported. In other sources I have read, Japan which has the 'lowest infant mortality rate' also has one of the highest late term mortality rates. Some speculate that for cultural reasons, live births are being counted as stillborns if the child does not survive the first few hours.

[neverdem]

Thanks for the link.

[neverdem]

Thanks for the URL.

[neverdem]

Thanks for the link.

[donna]

What’s the Mexico rate?

Isn’t it illegal aliens skewing the stats?

[Excellence]

It's good to see the posts that point out that in the U.S., any baby born alive at all gets a birth certificate, even if the baby dies of prematurity or other reasons hours or even minutes later. This is not done in other countries. If other countries counted all of their live births as births, they would have a much lower survival rate, too. My first niece only lived a few hours. Her parents left the hospital with both a birth and death certificate.

[olivia3boys]

One of my initial thoughts was that maybe the U.S. has more IVF births (wealthy nation that it is), which lead to more premature babies (even singleton IVF births tend to be more premature than non-IVF singleton births, and of course more IVF = more multiple births which = more complications/death).

[loveliberty2]

A visit to the Mises Institute web site, here, in an article by a senior fellow of that Institute and professor at Carthage College in Kenosha, WI, will explain the mortality rate issue. The writer is a former Russian economist.

[TASMANIANRED]

1) Teen births
2) Drug use
3) Fatal flawed comparisons.

[!1776!]

3) Fatal flawed comparisons.

Agreed.

Dirty little secret is that "infant mortality" is based on two definitions. The easy one mortality is in other words dead.

The hard one, at least for some, is infant. To my knowledge a tragic stillbirth is considered an infant mortality in the U.S., but not so in other nations. Other nations (to my knowledge) also include a period of time breathing on their own after birth prior to including in infant mortality statistics.

Doesn't appear that any "reporting" or "journalists" have the time to reconcile the basic issue as to what constitutes an "infant" in order to provide decent information for comparison. But why should they, the academics and from an obvious lack of outrage from medical professionals, they don't either.

If we are going to count more than others as a reason to assail or hope and change for a different system- lets get the real number. Include the number of little girls and little boys that get whacked for convenience in-utero.

Let's get started defining "infant." That is the issue.

[TASMANIANRED]

This is from the same crew that calls 20 and 21 teenagers.

[!1776!]

This is from the same crew that calls 20 and 21 teenagers.

Particularly when it is convenient for them to claim "children" without heathcare, or "children" killed by gun violence...