WHO Reports on Child Mortality and Health- U.S. gets a black eye.

One of the latest blurbs circulating the blogs and news reports are the recent reports by the World Health Organization concerning child health. Of the various rankings, none of which have the U.S. smelling like roses are the data concerning child mortality rates. With child mortality slipping on a global level, one of the prime indicators of child survival past age 5 has always been a nation's relative wealth and access to modern medicine. Somehow, the U.S. has managed to prove to be some form of an inversion of this or at least one hell of an outlier.

Of particular note are some of the countries that can boast a lower child mortality than us include all of the standard culprits in such health reports such as Canada, Japan, most of Western Europe, the entirely of Scandinavia etc. None of these are much of a surprise, but when looking a bit further down the list toward those countries still considered to be developing there is room for discussion. Our not really arch nemesis Cuba makes the list, as does Malaysia. After years of making jokes about "dumb Pollacks" over here, Poland somehow manages to avoid more child deaths than we do. So do most of the former communist countries currently in the EU including Slovakia, Czech Republic, Estonia, Lithuania. The per capita GDP of Poland, Estonia and Lithuania are under 20,000 and their health systems leave much to be desired, yet they are more capable of saving young lives than the supposedly best medical system in the world.

This world has gone topsy-turvy if the Poles can start mocking us.

To give an idea of where we sit, some of the countries that ranked dead even in child deaths per 1000 births included Chile and Latvia. For all of our righteous thumping about American health care, we are being eclipsed by portions of South America as well as one of the poorest and dysfunctional countries in Eastern Europe.

Already the excuses are trickling in on how certain countries record their birth rates differently so that there are different numbers as well as our being able to save problematic pregnancies and bring it to term and resulting in higher death rates. This becomes bunk considering that WHO does attempt to take data using the same criteria from its member nations. Some countries can be considered more trustworthy in their reporting than others, but given the fact that we are effectively trailing the entirety of the EU (which requires some degree of consistency in data reporting) as well as nearly every other developed country, we need to look at our health system and critically evaluate the reasons why we are unable to accomplish similar results to countries with a high comparative wealth.

This is one of those things that are far too complex to even attempt in a blog post and would actually make a good dissertation for a public policy PHD candidate.That said, it is yet another sign that we may need to be forced to shut up, stop making excuses and formulate some real solutions for our health care failures.

Link: World Health Statistics 2011