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Politics : A US National Health Care System? -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Archie Meeties who wrote (8511)	8/21/2009 12:43:08 PM
From: TimF	Respond to of 42652

The author doesn't take the step that is needed, which to factor out those variations and come up with a revised more accurate infant mortality rate. If one is unable or unwilling to do that it doesn't mean the criticism is not important or should just be ignored. If you show such a weakness in someone else's argument, than they can factor out the variations to shore up their argument, if no one does it then the original argument is much weaker then it would be without the adjustments. Counting stillborn rates and infant mortality the US is still below average for the richest countries, but not as much below average. For example instead of having a rate three and a half time higher than Iceland's (one of the best countries in this statistic) we have a rate that's about one an a half times higher (and not then the average rich country but than a small country that has one of the lowest rates). Then we have to consider that there are different definitions of stillbirth as well. (Although presumably when you have a dead infant in a rich country your going to get either a recorded case of still birth or a case of infant mortality, so its possible that when you consider the combination the differences in measurements are mostly sorted out, at least for the rich democracies.) Then we can ask why our rate is one and a half time Iceland's (or greater than some other countries to a lesser degree). You leap to the assumption that it has something to do with our health care insurance system but that's hardly a safe leap, esp. when we know that America has a high teenage pregnancy rate, and when we know there are millions of other factors, none of which get mentioned by those who like to make the simplistic argument that "the US has a higher infant mortality rate so our health care/health insurance, much be worse".