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

To: Archie Meeties who wrote (8578)	8/21/2009 5:03:39 PM
From: TimF	Respond to of 42652

the difference between Germany and US that was cited was the difference in counting birth weight <500g, none others. I'm not sure that's true, in any case if your making the case that the US is particularly bad on this issue, you have to consider differences in measurements besides those between the US and Germany. And again, even just for Germany, and even if the birth weight issue really is the only important difference you ignore the other two points in the post. "asserted your conclusion on that point, but you didn't present the data or methodology, so we can't even know if you really presented an actual comparison based on real data and solid methods, or just tossed out some numbers and said "see I'm right"." and "Furthermore you didn't adjust for, or even acknowledge other differences that have nothing to do with the way infant mortality is defined and measured" Alastair has already posted a much broader way to compare the same issue. It would have been nice if you lined to it, but I think I found it. "One way of looking at infant mortality is to use the perinatal death rate which is defined as the death rate from 22 weeks gestation to 7 days after birth. This may be a fairer estimate for comparison." Message 25882529 Well that would seem to be a fairer method (although we'd have to look at the methodology behind those rates as well), but no data was provided (other than where the US ranks, and rankings aren't really meaningful in this context, we could be 3rd and be well behind the 1st and 2nd, or we could be 18th and he asserts and be very close to the 1st and 2nd), and even if there are no problematic methodological quirks in that data, and all the measurements are done the same way, or with only insignificant differences, you still have the fact that differences in perinatal mortality are a very poor proxy for the quality of the health care and health insurance systems in different countries, since they are caused by many other things. Many of those other things would be hard to quantify or even to recognize, but one that is clearly at least somewhat important is the high rate of teenage pregnancy in the US. Edit - When I searched for stats on perinatal mortality other than one old study everything was about infant mortality rates.