As I’ve noted other times on Overlawyered, United States infant mortality statistics are artificially high relative to other nations, because of the way they are tabulated. In the US, heroic efforts are taken to save the lives of premature infants; when those efforts fail, the infant mortality statistic goes up; other nations with rationed single-payer health care consider the same child “stillborn” and do not register the death in the infant mortality statistics.
Amber Taylor points out that I may have missed part of the story, and a part that I should be especially sensitive to: the effect of legal rules creating financial incentives to count stillborns as infant deaths. (& Apr. 8: response to the latter point from Linda Gorman of the Independence Institute).
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