Who needs healthcare reform? Let’s start with the babies
Here’s the question that I would love for opponents of healthcare reform to answer:
How is it okay that thousands of babies are dying unnecessarily in the U.S. because of our broken medical system?
How many babies? Let’s do the math.
According to the CIA’s World Factbook, our country has an infant mortality rate of roughly 6.26 per thousand.
That’s about on par with Lithuania and Croatia.
What this means is that between 6 and 7 babies out of every thousand born die before they reach their first birthday.
There are roughly 4 million babies born each year in the U.S. That means 25,040 babies die under our system every year.
How does that stack up?
It turns out that our infant mortality rate is far worse than countries like Cuba, Italy, Taiwan, Sweden, and Macau — worse, in fact, that more than forty other nations.
Put bluntly, our medical system allows more babies to die than any other developed country in the world.
In large part, this is because tens of millions of women and children in the U.S. don’t receive pre-natal and preventative care.
They can’t afford their medications. They lack access to clinics and doctors.
As a consequence, they arrive in our hospitals malnourished, sick, and often burdened with developmental challenges that will last their entire lives.
And that’s if they survive.
It’s easy to get caught up in the debate over free markets, rationing and “big government.”
But the simple fact is that countries with single-payer national healthcare systems, like Britain and Canada, see about a fifth fewer babies die each year per capita.
What if America had a really first-rate healthcare system, say as good as Norway’s — another of those dreaded socialized systems?
The answer is pretty heartbreaking: 15,000 more of our babies every year would live to see their first birthday.
Let me do the math one more time.
In every state of the Union, on every single day of the year, a mother and a father wouldn’t have to grieve their son or daughter’s death.
Tags: health
