Tragic that the US has such high rates of alcohol and drug abuse.

It also may be true that “the US is more meticulous in tracking neonatal mortality than less developed countries, which skews the numbers.”

But, I hope you don't include France, Germany and Switzerland under “less developed countries?” It is those countries' infant mortality rate and other statistics we were discussing.

Finally, I still maintain that is highly unlikely that out of every 6,800 babies who die at birth in the U.S.,compared to 3,900 who die at birth in France, almost 3,000 of those deaths are caused by mothers who “are too busy with alcohol and crack.”

And, most important, I also maintain that our nation needs to provide affordable, accessible health care to all Americans.

Anyway, it has been a good discussion, and I learned something about drug and alcohol abuse in the US, albeit I do not think it is only prevalent in “inner city neighborhoods”

Yes I think we are, at least as it pertains to drug use, which is a prime contributor for neonatal mortality.

http://www.plosmedicine.org/article/info:doi/10...

As others have also said, the US is more meticulous in tracking neonatal mortality than less developed countries, which skews the numbers.

Don't take my word for it though, just go talk to some obstretricians and ask them why infant mortality is higher here. It's not because of a lack of funding.

Thanks for the feedback, DG, but…

Let's assume that you are correct in saying that some women in inner-city neighborhoods are “too busy with alcohol or crack'” to “come in” to get prenatal health care.

I just can not believe that this, what you call a “societal issue,” would result in almost twice an infant mortality rate in these United States as, say, in France.

Just do the math, according to your theory, out of every 6,800 babies who die at birth in the U.S.,compared to 3,900 who die at birth in France, almost 3,000 of those deaths are caused by mothers who “are too busy with alcohol and crack”?

Furthermore, don't you think that France and other European countries have their alcohol and crack problems, and other “societal” issues,too?

Every state as far as I know already provides for prenatal care. The problem isn't access to health care, it's getting the pregnant women to come in. Many of them are too busy with alcohol or crack. The infant mortality problem is not a medical one, it's societal.

Thanks for pointing out just another reason why our nation needs to provide affordable, accessible health care to all Americans, including “in places like inner-city neighborhoods” where one of the reasons infant mortality is higher is exactly the lack of such affordable health care.

In the United States of America, the wealthiest and most advanced nation in the world, there is absolutely no reason why infant health care “in places like inner-city neighborhoods” should not be as good as in “ordinary society.”

That is why the Dems are likely certain or nearly certain to keep the health care providers in this country at least nominally private (if the feds fund and control everything, obviously it is in name only but that's all that matters to some people, and also for legal purposes). Keeping them (at least nominally) private keeps the tort system going. Is it really likely that the Dems would end this and thwart one of their strongest special-interest groups? (No.)

The USA is not homogeneous. The distinction has to be made between infant morality in ordinary society and in places like inner-city neighborhoods where it's different for a variety of reasons and is not any kind of moral blot on the USA or US society as a whole.

“45 million is also in need of a qualifier”

Unable to afford insurance versus able to buy it but foregoing it for whatever reasons. (A typical “mascot” for the uninsured in the USA is a perfectly healthy college student, if activists want to claim sob stories.)

The 45 million is also in need of a qualifier, since some of us have elected high-deductible frameworks that register as uninsured since the counters only look at dollar one coverages..

Thanks for, with hard facts, laying to rest that far-right talking point that “socialist” European healthcare is such a disaster, so inferior to the US'.

Lower infant mortality rates and higher life expectancy rates than the US' at a lower percentage of GDP sound OK to me.

But, I am sure, as you say that some will “nitpick” and some will “come up with individual horror stories of 'health care gone wild'” to buttress their arguments against providing all Americans (the rich and the poor) with adequate, viable low cost health care.

Mr. Reagan exhibits so many symptoms of insanity (DMS-IV) that I'm surprised that anyone bothers.

Young Ron… where are you?

As I recall, US counts infant mortality differently. As I recall, cost of defensive medicine is much the culprit in the US as a result of our love of the tort system when somebody ill dies.

Per http://www.nchc.org/facts/cost.shtml

Health care spending accounted for 10.9 percent of the GDP in Switzerland, 10.7 percent in Germany, 9.7 percent in Canada and 9.5 percent in France, according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.

In 2008, the United States will spend 17 percent of its gross domestic product (GDP) on health care. It is projected that the percentage will reach 20 percent by 2017.

So we spend considerably more on our healthcare than these other countries with their national health plans. You spend more, you get more right?

So lets look at health:
How about infant mortality rates. These figures are for number of babies that die out of 1,000 live births. Courtesy of the CDC.

Switzerland 4.2
Germany 4.1
France 3.9
U.S 6.8

At least we know what that always is supposed to mean, a “conservative” in favor of vote-buying entitlement programs just like the Dems offer people, as well as in a broader sense a more liberal kind of conservative that (as with the Dems) first and foremost is nice and Makes People Feel Good.

(Presumably that's an alternative definition to “pseudo-Democrat” for “moderate” on this liberal Web site.)

In theory, the second will require travel outside the USA, because the theory includes the prohibition of any private insurance that duplicates care that is covered or controlled by the federal system. Some form of this is found in the Conyers-Kucinich bill for Medicare for All, as an example. It's the inverse of the game the Obama people and the Congressional Dems are playing with the incrementalist “public option” approach. The inverse is to prohibit a “private option” in the USA once everyone is exposed to public care so dissatisfied people with the means to do it won't start opting out of the system and violated the Sacred or Holy Objective of government entitlement programs including future health care, which is universality (and the underlying forced equity).

“If we want to provide 45 million currently uninsured people with health care comparable to what those of us who are insured receive…”

Yes, Mr. Reagan, it may sound unbelievable but some of us who already have good health care and insurance want to “provide 45 million currently uninsured people with health care comparable to what those of us who are insured receive.”

And, yeas, Mr. Reagaon, let's at least explore whether this can be done without reducing “the quality and quantity of health care services the currently insured receive or dramatically increase the supply of care.”

Aren't you supposed to be a compassionate Conservative, or has that gone out of the window, too, along with family values and moral values?

Some providers are already losing money and Obama threatens to reduce payments to providers as one way to pay for this initiative. Many providers refuse Medicare patients because of this; if they will be required by law to accept the patients, that is a form of slavery. Will this actually improve medicare care?

I'm also wondering why other politically difficult issues (at least difficult to providers), the more serious kinds of issues, aren't being addressed. (Obama's target audience may be not only not concerned with the serious issues, but often unable to grasp them as well.) Take supply, which is one thing listed by Reagan. One supply problem is the dearth of physicians in rural areas, often with few natural amenities and poorer economies — doctors, like other people leaving places like the Great Plains, want to live in other places instead. (Which is their right in a free country, you realize.) One thing the Obama people could do, coupled with another, stronger thing, is to offer medical-field scholarships of all kinds in exchange for working in the underserved areas (rural areas, inner city war zones) for four years, to name a specific, serious time period, after graduation. The Obama people could go on to manipulate residency assignments after med-school graduation to ensure doctors (during their residencies) were available in all parts of the nation. (It would be more sinister for them to set up a quota system or “cap and trade” for medical practices, general and specialties, throughout the nation to control supply and distribution of the various doctors. But even this is possible if people want government direction and [command and] control over medicine, in part to achieve liberal politically attractive goals, if disguised in logistical, effectiveness, or other words of concealment.)

That is, to say the least, a bold or audacious as well as outside-to-opposite-of-the-mainstream claim. Are you really that overconfident or idealistic (as opposed to realistic)?

“My response is: 'Boo Hoo'…lol..”

It's a common attitude. Note that there are real problems to address with, for example, Conyers-Kucinich and Medicare for All; their bill authorizes seizure and (forced) conversion of private providers to public, and specifically states that lost profits are not going to be compensated, a deliberate violation of the Constitution as well as low-life theft (that leaves certain people gloating).

We will also have to make some tough decisions on providing care to the elderly. Medicare can't continue to pay for expensive treatments for people who are near death (I'm talking mainly about aggressive surgeries, dialysis, cardiac angiography, etc). This problem needs to be addressed regardless of whatever health plan Obama comes up with and should have been addressed long ago. This will mean saying no to people and means people with a lot of money will get “better” care, two concepts that are anathema to politicians but eventually they'll have to face.

Speaking of which, to name one thing: Where are the cost projections and the assured new substantial source of revenue, i.e., the taxes? (Or will the losers take the losers' route and “solve” this simply by insisting that funding be made “mandatory” out of general revenues, and feel smug and assured that the problem has then been “solved” while pretending that all is well and it's up to others to do the real work?)