We're Very Concerned About Family Values Except Of Course When It Involves Children

Over at This Modern World, SeÃƒÆ’Ã‚Â±or MaÃƒÆ’Ã‚Â±ana is rightfully appalled about a new CNN story reporting that the American infant mortality rate is higher than that of all other industrialized countries except Latvia. And not just a little worse, a lot worse: "American babies are three times more likely to die in their first month as children born in Japan, and newborn mortality is 2.5 times higher in the United States than in Finland, Iceland or Norway."

SeÃƒÆ’Ã‚Â±or MaÃƒÆ’Ã‚Â±ana writes:

Because of some unholy confluence of conservatism, free-marketism, and general head-up-ass-ism, this country has never made health care for all a national priority. Things like this are the result, and it infuriates me... For a nation as advanced and wealthy as we are alleged to be, [it's] unspeakably obscene.

I agree. But this actually lets us off easy. America has favorable conditions matched by no other nation that's ever existed. We've suffered less than almost any country from armed conflict, even given the ferocious devastation that was the War of 1812. Meanwhile we have an extremely helpful, temperate climate and natural resources coming out of our noses. By contrast, Japan has 1/3 the infant mortality rate of ours, with no natural resources and sixty years after it was burned to the ground and then nuked. Europe is also far better, after it almost obliterated itself twice within the past century.

In other words, not only should we have the highest level of average health in the world, it shouldn't even be CLOSE. How far we've fallen short of this says something extremely unflattering about us.

For instance, here's how Canadian malcontent John Ralston Saul describes America in The Doubter's Companion: