America is among the richest nations in the world, and lays claim to many superlatives in terms of our quality of life. But in one critical and heartbreaking way, it’s lagging far behind.
A new report in the journal Health Affairs finds that over the last fifty years, childhood mortality rates in the United States (versus those of 19 economically similar countries in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, OECD) have been slowest to improve. To make that even more concrete, consider this: American babies are 76 percent more likely to die before they turn a year old than babies in other rich countries, including Canada, Australia, Italy and Germany. And American children who survive infancy are 57 percent more likely to die before adulthood. This isn’t new. Childhood deaths in American have been higher than all other peer nations since the 1980s, and over the 50-year period the researchers studied, that has amounted to the loss of more than 600,000 children. The question is, why" The study authors were able to pinpoint several overarching reasons for the elevated risks for children born Stateside.

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