I used to volunteer in a hospital where a few babies were sadly ditched in the maternity ward each week by drug-addled women. With this caliber of human scum breeding, do you really think it’s fair that health care system should shoulder all the blame? Even with unlimited prenatal care there are still going to be problems.

Actually, I hear that the witch doctors in the Democratic Republic of Congo have lower infant mortality rates that the witch doctors in Peru.

Marc,

You completely missed my point. Please try again.

It’s a shame to spoil your day when I point out that Marc is obviously right: US Health Care is awful! Who wouldn’t rather have their surgery done at Dirty NHS Hospital #79 than at some death trap like Hopkins or Mayo. While Harvard wastes its time shilling for drug companies and doing bogus medical research that only helps rich people, NHS hospitals are trailblazing with such as innovations as triaging in ambulances in the parking lot. The US doesn’t have thousands of foreign medical graduates competing for residencies seats here each year. And the outcomes are so bad you’d fare better trying your luck with a witch doctor in the jungle of Peru.

Nonsense - are you trying to tell me that all women in the US are receiving high quality antenatal care, not to mention general primary care when they weren’t pregnant? A healthcare system is not just the acute sector, but maternity services in the US are certainly much poorer across the board than in other countries - there’s plenty of data on this.

Hope I’m not spoiling your afternoon by pointing out that maternal and neonatal death rates are very poor proxies for the quality of a health care system. Those are affected by a host of factors over which the health care system has little to no influence, such as diet, genetics, socioeconomic status, etc. Furthermore, infant mortality statistics are notorious for being unreliably measured across many nations. Nations such as France and Belgium, for instance, don’t count any infants born prior to 26 weeks, thereby driving down their infant mortality rate.

Depends whether you think 4,000 babies is a small number, which is the number of excess deaths given a birth rate of 4 million a year. The difference in maternal mortality is much higher – 5 per 100,000 live births in Canada, 14 in the US (year 2000).

The Globe and Mail: “More than 100 Canadian women with high-risk pregnancies have been sent to United States hospitals over the past year – in what a doctors’ group attributes to the lack of a national birthing plan.”…