Here’s the question that I would love for opponents of healthcare reform to answer:<\/p>\n
How is it okay that thousands of babies are dying unnecessarily in the U.S. because of our broken medical system?<\/p>\n
How many babies? Let’s do the math.<\/p>\n
According to the CIA’s World Factbook, our country has an infant mortality rate of roughly 6.26 per thousand.<\/p>\n
That’s about on par with Lithuania and Croatia.<\/p>\n
What this means is that between 6 and 7 babies out of every thousand born die before they reach their first birthday.<\/p>\n
There are roughly 4 million babies born each year in the U.S. That means 25,040 babies die under our system every year.<\/p>\n
How does that stack up?<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
Put bluntly, our medical system allows more babies to die than any other developed country in the world. <\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
They can’t afford their medications. They lack access to clinics and doctors.<\/p>\n
As a consequence, they arrive in our hospitals malnourished, sick, and often burdened with developmental challenges that will last their entire lives.<\/p>\n
And that’s if they survive.<\/p>\n
It’s easy to get caught up in the debate over free markets, rationing and “big government.”<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
What if America had a really first-rate healthcare system, say as good as Norway’s — another of those dreaded socialized systems?<\/p>\n
The answer is pretty heartbreaking: 15,000 more of our babies every year would live to see their first birthday.<\/p>\n
Let me do the math one more time.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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