
Why Is Infant Mortality Higher in the United States Than in Europe? - modanq
http://pubs.aeaweb.org/doi/pdfplus/10.1257/pol.20140224
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maxerickson
Preprint:

[https://www.brown.edu/research/projects/oster/sites/brown.ed...](https://www.brown.edu/research/projects/oster/sites/brown.edu.research.projects.oster/files/uploads/Why_is_Infant_Mortality_Higher_In_US.pdf)

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danielvf
When I was a typically paranoid new parent, I researched the odds of both at
birth and after birth deaths. I was very surprised by the huge racial
differences - a black infant is more than twice as likely to die during the
first year than a white or Hispanic infant.

US statistics:

[http://kff.org/other/state-indicator/infant-mortality-
rate-b...](http://kff.org/other/state-indicator/infant-mortality-rate-by-race-
ethnicity/)

However, the parent paper's abstract says that the primary difference is
economic - yet US hispanics have identical infant death rates to white
Americans. Could anyone with access to the paper see if the authors actually
for this a stronger correlation than race?

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modanq
In the conclusion the allude to two areas for improvement: access and
prevention.

1) "Our results on neonatal mortality strongly suggest that differential
access to technology-intensive medical care provided shortly after birth is
unlikely to explain the US IMR disadvantage"

2) "... in general, policy attention should focus on either preventing preterm
births or on reducing postneonatal mortality."

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jacalata
That's interesting, I hear people say it's just because of the definitional
differences so I'm glad to have learned this.

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a3n
Because we have failed to decide that that is not acceptable.

