Update: I noticed that in the linked to OECD report, only the OECD countries, plus Romania, report the same 22-week threshold. That may be why those countries were picked (for a proper comparison with the same IVs.)
For the record, I'm pretty sure most of the world has caught up on methods to gather mortality data, especially all of the countries I had mentioned.
Where there are fewer black people or native americans.
In the US it almost follows to a T a heat map of where black people and reservations are. Except the places where there are enough hispanics to counter balance them, because for whatever reason hispanic identifying populations do comparatively quite well even with lower incomes.
International comparisons often use OECD data, because it's the best data source that exists. The organization has spent decades collecting data based on consistent definitions across its member states. Even the same data collected directly from the national authorities of OECD members is often worse. The data released for domestic uses often uses national definitions, which vary subtly from country to country.
Not saying that other question isn't worth looking at too. It's just a separate one from the one in this article.
What happens to postpartum mothers is certainly another question worth looking at, but the two questions are separate enough after birth that one can still be perfectly "relevant" without the other.
(It's not hard to guess which country would come out looking even worse than it already does in this table.)
I wonder how the consistent gestational period adjustments would affect the statistics for the various states.
https://www.nbcnews.com/health/womens-health/pregnant-women-...
I consulted for an opioid surveillance program several years ago at a large scale data analytics level.
It was very sobering - basically the scientists could score each pregnancy in the state on a scale of 0-100, where 0% was <5% probability of being born addicted and 100 was >95%.
Most addicted mothers got hooked on painkillers as a result of injury or sickness. The biggest factors were access to healthcare, access to transportation, and health insurance. “Bad” zip codes were like 10x more likely to have an opioid addiction and 25x more complications.
Being a new dad at the time, it really affected my view of politics in this space. I realized that as cynical as I am, it’s not enough.
People there live, on average, 4.5 years shorter than people where I live with something like 10 fewer healthy years.
The statistics comparing people born here and there are pretty awful. Despite having the same hospital, infant mortality rate is something like 2x (although the statistical uncertainty is high).
How is this not a failure of society? In addition: I live in a country with pretty high social mobility, especially compared to the US...
>A baby in the UK, France, or the US can be two to three times more likely to die than one in Japan or Finland
why do they reference the UK while none of the graphs feature the UK?
The opening graph is from the Office for National Statistics. The ONS is a UK govt department. So there is some UK data in the article but this is first-year mortality, not first month.
The author does say:
> The precise birth data needed to produce these comparable rates is not available for all countries, so only a selection of OECD countries is shown.
Perhaps this is the reason.
I do agree though, it's mighty strange to have not included an interpretation of you're going to mention them in the text. Perhaps they were excluded after the text was written?
Curiously, France has almost the exact same rate than Finland (200 per 1000 births), which tops the mortality list.
"Japan, Sweden, and Finland are at the very bottom. They’re consistently among the best, even when we adjust for reporting inconsistencies. The other Nordic countries — Denmark and Norway — also have very low mortality rates."
homeless_engi•1d ago
insane_dreamer•1d ago
FirmwareBurner•1d ago
pixl97•1d ago
mystified5016•1d ago
That's why the US is always at the very bottom of rankings like this.
rwmj•1d ago
FirmwareBurner•1d ago
Muromec•1d ago
rayiner•1d ago
const_cast•1d ago
Sure, we're not the absolute worst, but we are the most expensive. And, for that, we get close to the worst results. Clearly, our healthcare system is broken in a variety of complex ways.
rayiner•1d ago
My six year old boy ran into a table and got a black eye. Took him to the doctor (because my wife made me), who physically examined him and saw he was fine. But ordered a CT scan anyway (which we got the same morning because this is America). No sane healthcare system would order a CT scan for this! But in our litigation-driven system, the doctor has to do it, because in the extremely unlikely situation that there was an undetected internal bleed, he’d get sued. And some expert would get on the stand and say the standard of care is to order a CT scan every time a six year old boy does a six year old boy thing.
const_cast•1d ago
We have an extremely fragmented system that breeds inefficiency. Thousands of insurers, so hospitals have hundreds of billing specialists. Thousands of plans, so the complexity of what is and isn't covered explodes beyond belief. There's no streamlining, no centralization, no authority. Just bickering and "erm, ackshually" from every party. Every interaction has extremely high friction that comes with a massive, fragmented system.
It's like a microservice architecture with thousands and thousands of microservices. Except their contracts aren't always published, sometimes you need to call them on the telephone. And sometimes you just have to try requests and see if they get denied.
Also, I think a CT for head injury is fairly standard practice. I think they do that in Europe. Anyway I had some pain somewhere inconspicuous once and it was cancer, so. I don't think the issue is we image too much.
tptacek•1d ago
const_cast•1d ago
We do image a lot for injuries. Maybe it's to give radiologists something to do, I don't know.
tptacek•1d ago
But it's also probably not true that we screen less aggressively than Europe. For instance, I think we start breast cancer screening earlier than Europe. There are European countries with better rates of colorectal screening, but that's a patient compliance issue as much as anything else (and 10 years from now standard of care is unlikely to be imaging-based for that screening for most pts).
rayiner•1d ago
FirmwareBurner•1d ago
Chiming in here from a rich EU country. CT for head bumps at the ER is not standard unless the doctor deems it absolutely necessary in grave injuries since the public system is already clogged up. Only X-ray on the spot is standard.
When I had my bicycle accident they did no CT scan, only head Xray. They said they'll do a head CT only if concussion symptoms don't go away or worsen after a few days.
In poor EU countries, you don't even get an Xray if your skull isn't cracked wide open because there's already 100 people in the ER waiting with even bigger issues than you. My dad slipped and fell on a concrete floor and the ER sent him home after looking at him for 3 seconds telling him "it looks fine". If he went to a private hospital he'd get all the imaging he wants since he'd be paying out of pocket and they'll never say NO to money.
I feel like Americans live in a parallel universe where healthcare has infinite money so they throw expensive checks procedures at the wall since insurance pays anyway, but that's not the case in public systems where money is tight than the government demands frugality from hospitals and doctors.
bamboozled•1d ago
otherme123•1d ago
TrackerFF•1d ago
Interesting in the sense that the Nordics have a vastly different healthcare system than Japan.
ty6853•1d ago
My hypothesis is there may be something like this effect happening, where once you control for nordic people in similarly white states I bet they'd have much closer to nordic birth risk.
tokai•1d ago
ty6853•1d ago
Or compare hispanic to blacks at similar income in USA, they knock them out the park on infant mortality.
keybored•1d ago
The Seychelles Gini coefficient is higher than Sweden. There doesn’t seem to be data on the Bahamas.
ty6853•1d ago
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/economic-inequality-gini-...
keybored•1d ago
Muromec•1d ago
Having mostly flat income inequality can mean either of those -- everybody is rich and paying taxes and people with money are tax evading really good, so poor don't have access to healthcare.
Then again, just because country has allocated money for healthcare, the outcome depends on how many sick/old/poor people need it and how well it's used up, because corruption exists and isn't reflected in Gini coeff.
keybored•22h ago
keybored•1d ago
> My hypothesis is there may be something like this effect happening, where once you control for nordic people in similarly white states I bet they'd have much closer to nordic birth risk.
That follows from murder rates? I don’t follow.
const_cast•1d ago
We need to be very careful with statistics, because rarely does one or even a dozen cover the whole picture. For example, in the US we can see that black individuals are more likely to commit crime. We could easily run with that and draw some unfavorable conclusions.
But, they're also much more likely to be impoverished, more likely to live in communities with low infrastructure funding, more likely to live in communities with drugs, more likely to have much poorer access to education, and more likely to face barriers to employment.
ty6853•1d ago
Definitely not interested in accepting eugenics either, just maybe we should acknowledge and be OK with the fact some demographics are just different and we shouldn't be forcing them to be like the nordics.
const_cast•1d ago
In regards to Seychelles - are we looking at levels of education? Are we looking at income inequality? Are we looking at corruption? Are we even considered how developed the nation is? How long have they been developing? Have we taken a gander at any population pyramids?
Again, it feels like we're hamfisting these things to draw conclusions that we want to draw. I don't think just having white people fixes things, we need to look at what those white people are doing that actually works. Even money doesn't necessarily fix things, if you're already underdeveloped or you have high corruption.
ty6853•1d ago
It is quite an inconvenient hypothesis. Unfortunately I have some weak data that leads the question to persist and no strong evidence against it. I see no reason why it can be dismissed.
const_cast•1d ago
Time and time again, we prove those hypothesis wrong. As countries develop and equality is prioritized, we see more and more differences disappear.
Ultimately, I have no reason to believe we have achieved the apex of development or equality. Systemic racism is real, because racism doesn't just disappear. We implemented integration just a few decades ago in a lot of communities, and that disconnect and resentment that built doesn't just - poof! - disappear. It continues on and manifests in less opportunities for education, more drugs in communities, and a lot of second order effects that transcend generations.
We even still see black populations today distributed as we saw them during slavery. And that was 150 years ago. These things don't get solved, they just get better, a little bit at a time over very long periods of time.
I dismiss the hypothesis because we have already dismissed the hypothesis more times than we can count. And, I have no reason to believe this time it's different.
ty6853•1d ago
If even sovereign, nord-level equal in income, relatively well off black nations have US-black level infant mortality then it's not really my place to tell them to be more like the white man and do something that drops it but has god knows what other unintended consequences. Maybe they benefit in some other way. I have no idea.
const_cast•1d ago
ty6853•1d ago
I hope someday society can see your plan of less interventionism is the more correct one.
mensetmanusman•1d ago
It’s baked into the law and has resulted in the essential elimination of people with downs for example.
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2020/12/the-las...
_DeadFred_•1d ago