Best Healthcare System in the World: Infant Mortality

One of the reasons for the push to Obamacare and away from the health care status quo is that our system costs way more than other places and yields results that are the same or worse as other countries. One of the metrics that lets us know our health care system is worse is that our infant mortality rate is worse than our peer countries. So, what explains the infant mortality rates?

Those in favor of the health care system status quo like to blame the differential on the measurements. It’s not that the U.S. actually has worse outcomes for infants, we just measure things more thoroughly and report more infant deaths. Aaron Carroll at the Incidental Economist has a post discussing a study that looks at this issue. And, in fact, these advocates have a point it seems. The reporting differences might explain up to 40% of the infant mortality differential — but that leaves us a long way to go.

It seems that one major area where our health system fails is in the period between one month and one year old. And, in particular, it fails infants who don’t have the good sense to be born to white, college-educated, married mothers. Those infants have a similar mortality rate as their European counterparts. The other infants are more likely to die.

I think it’s safe to say that being poor in the U.S. is a lot tougher than being poor in other Western countries.