What does people dying from violence and automobile accidents have to do with our health care system?
Anyway, from the opinion piece in
The Atlantic:
In presenting their findings Wednesday, the authors seemed to be urging the U.S. to do some soul searching. Our culture "cherishes independence" and "wants to limit the intrusion of government in our personal lives," said Steven Woolf, director of the Center for Human Needs at Virginia Commonwealth University, the panel chairman. While those values serve us in some ways, he said, our resistance to regulation "may work against our ability to achieve optimal health outcomes."
The panelists' subtext: There's no turning a blind eye anymore, guys. We have to care.
Co-author Paula Braveman, who directs the Center on Social Disparities in Health at University of California, San Francisco, said the panel grappled with this question as it searched for explanations for our poor health: "Is it Americans' rugged individualism and the sense that the most important thing is the individual's freedom, and that's so much more important than doing what's right for society?"
Might our national M.O., in other words, be summed up as "Live free and die"?
Wow...just Wow
I also love how people like this mention infant mortality rates, which are for the most part a sham since every country measures it differently. The US is one of the very few countries who constitutes a "live birth" as any baby who shows any signs of life (heartbeat, muscle activity, gasping for breath) outside the womb. Most every other country has countless prequalifiers such a birth weight, gestation, length. In Russia for example, a baby born at 28 weeks, weighting under 1000 grams, and under 35 cm isn't counted as a live birth unless it lives for 7 days. If the baby dies before the 7th day it would be considered still born and wouldn't be counted against Russia's infant mortality rate.
Comparing infant mortality rates..........apples and oranges.
