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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: TimF who wrote (353678)	10/4/2007 11:22:07 PM
From: combjelly	Respond to of 1584759

"Over or under 1.5 kg isn't the only criteria. Different countries use different criteria, not all of which are based on weight at all, such as "an infant must be at least 30 centimeters long at birth to be counted as living."" And the weight of a baby that size is, guess what?, under 1.5 kilos. Consider it just another way to express the same parameter. "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." Right. And the percent of overall births this affects is small. Just like the ELBW babies. "Than there is the fact that however you measure infant mortality it isn't purely determined by difference in health insurance. In fact it might not be primarily determined by such differences." Maybe not directly. But, it is generally accepted that prenatal care is the major factor in infant mortality. If you look at the countries with very low infant mortality, you will find a common idea. All give pregnant mothers some inducement, usually cash on the order of the equivalent of $50 to $100, to have regular prenatal checkups. And there is a notable decline in infant mortality from before the programs started and afterwards. Hence the reason why prenatal care is considered key. And here is the real kicker. It reduces the need to have that highly vaunted technology to support ELBW and LBW babies and other developmental disorders. So it actually turns out the be much, much cheaper in dollars over the long run. Not to mention the human issues. Such preventative systems are almost never implemented with private insurance. There are a lot of structural reasons why that is true.