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> It's difficult to track infant mortality across countries, because countries have different standards for reporting infant mortality. My understanding is that
by yladiz 4y ago
> It's difficult to track infant mortality across countries, because countries have different standards for reporting infant mortality. My understanding is that our ranking there is in significant part an artifact of measurement.
I'm pretty skeptical of this, at least that there is such a significant difference in reporting that it would actually change the end result. Do you have any links to studies or other resources to add to this?
> On the other hand, there are other metrics of health care quality.
Sure, you can effectively game the system by choosing the right statistic, but broadly speaking the US performs poorly or "the worst" on many, many metrics. Like it is hard to square up the US not being worst or almost worst when it's got almost double maternal mortality than the next country on the graph in the article (New Zealand) and almost 2.5 times the OECD average.
- hotpotamus 4y agoLife expectancy seems similarly hard to game and pretty poor for the US.
- tptacek 4y agoLife expectancy in the US is heavily biased because of traffic fatalities. That's bad, but not an indicator of poor health care.
- nosianu 4y agoThat statement dopes not tell us much without you also telling us how that is handled in other countries. If you look at "List of countries by traffic-related death rate" the USA is far from the top of that list, so other countries would have it much worse with their own life-expectancy impact. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_traffic-related_death_rate https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_traffic-r...
- MagnumOpus 4y agoCompared to developed European countries (that you should compare them to), it is at the top of the list, 2-5x higher rates per capita. Same goes for homicide rates which the above poster also mentioned.
- jandrewrogers 4y agoActually, life expectancy is badly skewed by the rates of fatal injury when people are in their 20s, which ruins the average. The US has anomalously high fatal injury rates in young people due to things like automotive accidents and homicides. If you remove fatal injuries and similar from the statistics, Americans have among the highest life expectancies.
- hotpotamus 4y agoI suspect drug overdoses are mixed in there too. I believe there are also significant differences between the states (with fairly predictable trends). I suppose it all depends on how you measure public health, but the picture seems grim regardless.