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When commissars (or czars) run health care

August 25, 2009 in Politics

Health care (or is that Hellth care) under the mother-of-all-public-everything systems. An interesting piece of information that I had also seen in another place. Critics of American health care often point to lower life expectancy and higher infant mortality in the U.S. As to the former, the difference is very slight compared to most European countries, but the difference is more than due to the higher reported American infant mortality rate. As Mark Steyn has often pointed out, once Americans get to the stage where they need care, they have much higher survival rates. In cancers, for example.

As to the infant mortality, the article points out that Americans count all dead babies, including prematurely born infants. Most do not. Many do not report infants as statistics for infant mortality until they are of a certain age in days or weeks. He notes that Cuba, which boasts a low infant mortality rate (a point of pride for Michael Moore, one can be sure), infants are not registered until several months later, thereby excluding from mortality statistics infants that die before then. Presumably the idea behind such gaming of the numbers (other than to make the system look good) is that deaths before a certain date are likely due to the infant’s physiology, not to defects in the country’s medical system.

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