Where do people fly when they want the best quality healthcare, asks Dennis Prager. Do they go to Canada or Belgium or France or Germany? Nope. They come to the United States for the best care.
Besmirching America’s reputation is a vocation on the left.
Throughout the developed world, and regardless of the health-care system, infant-mortality rates are far worse among minority populations, and the U.S. has much more diversity of race and ethnicity than any other developed nation. Whether in wholly government-run health-care systems — like Canada’s, or the U.K.’s NHS — or in the mixed U.S. system, racial and ethnic minorities have higher infant-mortality rates, roughly double those of the majority. While these disparities are among the most perplexing problems in society, they are extremely complex, identifiable even when other risk factors (including maternal age, marital status, and education) are taken into account, and often entirely separate from health-care quality. Population heterogeneity specifically distorts mortality rates in the U.S., because the racial-ethnic heterogeneity of the U.S. is far higher, four to eight times that found in Western European nations like Sweden, Norway, France and the UK.
The fact is that for decades, the U.S. has shown superior infant-mortality rates using official National Center for Health Statistics and European Perinatal Health Report data — in fact, the best in the world outside of Sweden and Norway, even without correcting for any of the population and risk-factor differences deleterious to the U.S. — for premature and low-birth-weight babies, the newborns who actually need medical care and who are at highest risk of dying.
In summary, the analysis and subsequent comparison of neonatal- and infant-mortality rates have been filled with inconsistencies and pitfalls, problematic definitions, and inaccuracies. Even the use of the most fundamental term, “live births,” greatly distorts infant-mortality rates, because often the infants who die the soonest after birth are not counted as live births outside the United States. In the end, these comparisons reflect deviations in fundamental terminology, reporting accuracy, data sources, populations, and cultural-medical practices — all of which specifically disadvantage the U.S. in international rankings. And unbeknownst to organizations bent on painting a picture of inferior health care in the U.S., the peer-reviewed literature and even the WHO’s own statements agree.
— Scott W. Atlas, M.D., is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and a professor at Stanford University Medical Center. He is the author of the forthcoming book In Excellent Health: Setting the Record Straight on America’s Health Care (Hoover Press).
