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Obama to Planned Parenthood in 2007:……

As a mom of an almost-2-year-old born at home with the help of midwives (and using my HSA to pay for it), I’ve studied a lot about the infant mortality rate. As usual, many problems can be traced back to liberal actions. It’s been stated that part of the high infant mortality rate is due to prematurity. Well, here’s my angle on why there’s so much prematurity: ambulance chasers like John Edwards and Obama’s trial lawyer buddies who fight tort reform tooth and nail and make doctors overly vulnerable to being sued.

Doctors (especially obstetricians) often practice defensive medicine, in which at the first sign of trouble, the baby is induced or cut out of the womb via c-section. Both induction and c-section are more inherently dangerous and produce more deaths for mother and baby than natural birth do. The WHO, despite its flaws, is correct that the best overall rate of c-section is from 10 to 15%. That is the point at which the benefits of c-sections outweigh the higher risk of infection, blood loss, and as stated above, prematurity.

Also, often babies are predicted through ultrasound to be much larger than they really are, which prompts more pressure for inductions, which raises the c-section rate because the baby wasn’t ready to be born.

The current rate of c-section in the US is one in three, double to triple what it should be, and causing many more babies to be born prematurely. Thanks, John Edwards and trial lawyers!

Since I am a conservative and have ideas for solutions and not just complaints about problems, I think tort reform is in order, because sometimes things just go wrong. If it can be proven the doctor truly messed up or was negligent, ok. But some babies are just going to be unlucky, just as some people are unlucky and are born with congenital defects.

Also, midwifery care should be encouraged in addition to out-of-hospital birth for healthy moms and babies. If you look at the stats, home birth is actually SAFER than hospital birth because of the low intervention rate. Yes, hospitals and surgeons are needed for some births, but not most. And home birth with midwives is MUCH, MUCH cheaper! Going to midwifery care as a first option and only using OB’s when needed would save billions upon billions right there.

Startling comparison in a single country.

And where care for our dogs, cats and horses puts our own system to the greatest shame is in the domain of wait times and access to specialists. Our pets may not be able to talk, but they can get an appointment with a primary care vet within 24 hours and a specialist within the week. “I have a friend who had a dog with cancer and it got treatment within two weeks,” says Tina Kelly, an IT buyer in Waterloo, Ont. “For something like that in a human, I bet the response would’ve been 10 times as long.”

Oh, and check the rates and availability for Lasik in the USA.

…plan’s policies are unique in that they are fully customizable through a choice of coinsurance and deductibles, allowing (policyholders) to select the coverage that is most appropriate to their needs and budget. Additionally, …plan is the only … insurer in the United States to cover hereditary conditions with no dollar limits per condition. Most importantly, once … insured with …plan, they’ll be covered for any condition they develop, no matter how long the condition lasts. This is called “Covered for Life” and it can prove to be invaluable when you consider that 30-40 percent of all … insurance claims are for chronic conditions that last beyond 12 months.

From the first day of Junior High School to the last day of High School I had to take a P.E. Class. The only way you could take it in summer school was if you failed it the previous year.

chemman on August 20, 2009 at 12:26 PM

In my high school, summer school PE was almost exclusively the realm of the football player. They treated it as a kind of under the table pre-season workout.

you have to add back in the health cares costs that other countries hide in non-health care portions of their budgets.

And as for the infant mortality, i was pointed in the direction of an article that refuted my claim, so i admitted it…so no need to be so hasty about justifying ‘the inexcusable’

ernesto on August 20, 2009 at 11:43 AM

Infant mortality strongly affects overall life expectancy.

… But while we’re on the subject, life expectancy has risen, but we remain low…and infant mortality in this country remains atrocious…primarily due to the fact that prenatal care is not guaranteed. If we’re ok with laws that are written in the interest of the child (think child protective services), why should we be ok with american babies born without modern pre/post natal care as a guarantee…regardless of ones ability to pay for it?

ernesto on August 20, 2009 at 11:04 AM

The measurement for infant mortality is inconsistent country to country. Some do not include those born before 28 weeks in their data and others omit or also omit those born under 500g. Very low birth weight, adjusted or non-adjusted for gestational age is a sure sequale of other factors that can lead to death – such as respiratory distress, cardiac failures etc. Very low birth rate mortality is somewhere around 400 per 1000 live births. Can you see where omitting that group of infants would skew your data?

Congenital abnormalities is the second leading cause of infant mortality – a good deal of countries omit infant deaths due to congenital deformities so the IMR is also skewed. Further, the US has a lower rate of neo-eugenics than other developed countries, in other words – we abort less. This fact also skews the data as we are more likely than other countries to bring to term a “less than perfect” infant.

Without any adjustments our mortality rate is around 6.5% – and you feel this is “atrocious”. Yet again you fail to recognise that our health care system has more safety measures and systems in place to try to ensure a successful pregnancy. Pre-natal and post-natal care in this country is superior and easily found. No it’s not “guaranteed” but your lack of acknowledgment of it’s availability and affordablity (often free) is disingenuous.

I hope these facts help you understand and re-examine the false and misleading data you have been fed.

ernesto on August 20, 2009 at 12:24 PM

The only silly person is you. Such hubris in thinking that you actually know what any of us “ultra-rural” types believe.

rockmom on August 20, 2009 at 11:38 AM

What a difference a decade makes. I graduated from High School in 1969. From the first day of Junior High School to the last day of High School I had to take a P.E. Class. The only way you could take it in summer school was if you failed it the previous year.

that article was linked earlier, first i saw it. forced me to tailor my argument, but isnt that why the internet is so glorious?

ernesto on August 20, 2009 at 11:59 AM

Yeah, I linked it. I just thought it needed to be said again. I don’t always clink on links myself…the internet is glorious! Keeping bookmarks is the greatest thing ever!

chemman on August 20, 2009 at 12:18 PM

well yeah, i suppose there are you outlier ultra-rural types that live off the grid…but if you live in some unincorporated stretch of land in the middle of nowhere, most if not all of the demand for any services at all must seem silly.

All homes have to have connections to local utilities, that are subsidized to provide a basic level of service to just about anyone.

Really? That would come as a major surprise to all of us who don’t have a single connection to any local utility.
The only thing worse that being foolish ernesto is opening your mouth and letting the world know you are foolish.

JAM on August 20, 2009 at 11:58 AM

that article was linked earlier, first i saw it. forced me to tailor my argument, but isnt that why the internet is so glorious?

“… the infant mortality rate in this country is not rising but falling. It is because of an astonishingly capable level of healthcare. That care comes from neonatology, one of medicine’s highest-tech, highest-touch specialties, nestled in the heart of our children’s hospitals”….
“Saving premature infants is expensive. The United States spends $5.8 billion, about a quarter of all expenditures for pediatric hospitalizations, on care of neonates. On that, not surprisingly, we lead the world. But some argue we spend too much on neonatal care and not enough on prevention, which they maintain would reduce the number of preterm babies.Granted, we must also focus on bringing babies to term and educating people about controllable risk factors that lead to problem pregnancies: smoking, uterine infection, and drug abuse. Pregnancy in the teen years and in middle age. And fertility treatments that increase the risk of twins and other multiples from a uterus designed for babies one at a time.

But how is this a case of either-or?”

or they would have tort reform as their first priority as it immediately adds 10% to the cost of any medical visit/procedure.

JAM on August 20, 2009 at 11:47 AM

I’ve got to agree with you there. That they never open with that argument shows that there’s more to their motives…but then again, there ALWAYS more to a politician’s motives. Its not an entirely democrat phenomenon, but its a pretty lousy state of affairs…

Given the CDC stats above, I did the math:
23,117,608 die each year with healthcare (760 per 1000 population CDC statistics)

or 0.095 percent of people die each year without health care.

Which also goes to the Health Care isn’t broken point.

If it was good enough for Reagan… ;-)

ernesto on August 20, 2009 at 11:45 AM

Reagan was certainly the best in recent memory by far, but not quite perfect. I’m going to stand back and watch the troll killers eat you now…