Wanna give your baby its best shot at life? Move to a country with socialized health care.

posted by i.n.kazar

As a follow-up to my examination of life expectancy here is a selected list of countries in order of "number of infant mortality deaths per 1,000 live births. On this list, the closer one is to #1 the worse the survival rate of newborns, so I'm starting from the end.


224. Singapore: 2.31 infant deaths/1000

223. Bermuda: 2.46

222. Sweden: 2.75

221. Japan: 2.79

[and again: "OK but where's the U.S., did you skip it??"]

217. France: 3.33

214. Norway: 3.58

211. Czech Republic: 3.79

204. South Korea: 4.26

198. Netherlands: 4.73

196. Australia: 4.75

193. United Kingdom: 4.85

189. Canada: 5.04

["WHAT ABOUT THE U.S.?!" ... hang on, I'm almost there]

181. Cuba: 5.82

[and now quite a decline between Communist Cuba and the next one on the list ...]

180. United States: 6.26

Yes, that is right, according to the CIA's figures your baby born in this country is 2.7 times as likely to die in infancy than a baby born in the top-ranked Singapore. At number 38 from the end of the CIA's reverse-ranked list, the U.S. ranks near the bottom of the second decile when looking at the survival rate of infants around the globe.

Still think that our money-driven health system is something to cling to? I have some ideas as to why our infant mortality rate would be so high, but I'll leave that for a possible future post.