The death rate for US children has surged by 25 percent over the past decade, according to a study published last month by pediatrician Dr. Christopher Forrest and colleagues in the Journal of the American Medical Association. Even as the child mortality rate has slowly fallen in other developed countries, it has surged in the US, along with every other indicator of chronic illness.
Now imagine how much worse it would be without the ACA which was enacted in March of 2010. For profit health care is a death sentence for the lower classes. We need medicare for all.
It’s not actually healthcare that’s making the difference, though (at least not for children >1 year old; not sure about infants). The real causes of the high death rate are cultural: shootings, car wrecks (i.e. car-dependent infrastructure), and drugs.
Basically, the actual policy changes we need to fix this problem are:
(Side note: although I posted the chart from the article, I don’t support its bias: “firearms” and “homicide” should not be separate categories. Attributing the problem to access to guns is bullshit; there are other places that have similar access but don’t have the death rate. The real difference is that people in those places simply don’t want to kill kids as much Americans do to begin with.)
Net differences in rates =/= rates.
Over the last 30 years cars are the largest killers of kids.
I would say gun violence taking the lead is actually due to work from home reducing car traffic and therefore collisions.
LMFAO “the main reason is guns, but I don’t like that so let’s mix the data into other categories to obfuscate the issue so no one else can use it to support gun reform”
Yeah, other countries have access to guns, but they also have a lot more licensing requirements and restrictions. That keeps guns away from idiots, unsafe people, and criminals. That’s the difference, gun reform.
You 2A people have zero reading comprehension because I’ve never seen one of you in a well regulated militia.
Do you even begin to comprehend how absolutely sick and twisted it is to be like “hurr durr let’s make society so toxic that everybody wants to murder everybody else and that’s A-OK as long as we don’t let them access easy means to do it!”?
WTF is wrong with you, that you refuse to acknowledge – let alone work to solve – the real problem?!
Buddy, the average American isn’t any more depraved as anyone else. The US just gives guns to people who shouldn’t have them and then provides them no training nor help with their problems.
Buddy, the US is quickly becoming a third world country. Yes, mass school shooting are normalized but that’s the symptom not the root problem.
See? You identified it yourself. Universal healthcare that includes quality mental health care that isn’t driven by profit is the solution to the listed problems, I’m not sure why they listed drugs and failed to recognize healthcare as the solution that too, but people turn to drugs to drown the depression they can’t treat in a healthy way.
Because pumping people full of Prozac instead of fentanyl (or whatever they turned to to cope) does fuck-all to solve them having to juggle three jobs while still barely being able to afford rent on their shitty apartment and being justifiably in despair about it.
The real problem isn’t a chemical imbalance if your life actually does suck!
That’s not mental healthcare… That’s just different drugs.
USA is a society of violence, and guns is a significant part of that.
USA needs both socioeconomic reform and much stricter gun control laws.
Just because you can’t blame guns alone, it doesn’t follow that guns aren’t a significant part of the problem.
It’s both the mentality like stand your ground, and 3 times and you’re out, and the guns that enable extreme violence extremely easy.
Already common rhetoric is extremely violent in USA, with “the war” on everything. How’s that war on drugs going? When did it begin? Wasn’t it in the 80’s? That’s nearing a half a century war now! No other country in the world has been at continuous war for that long.
Statistics are so easy to manipulate. Look at the actual data and it’s obviously click-bait. Yeah the number is up but not so much in context.
That seems significant enough. Do you have a criticism other than “they used statistics”?
I have a criticism.
No one should consider the US a developed country.
“Staggering” and “dramatically” are not statistical terms.
They are descriptive terms used in the article to describe the statistics. They don’t change the statistics, 54 excess child deaths a day.
I could do without the editorialization then. I could use some help interpreting the numbers, but they lose me with words like “staggering”.
How would you describe 54 excess child deaths per day? Harrowing maybe? Depressing perhaps?
Or you think it’s possibly not one of this? It’s it comforting to you? Pretty weird one to be upset over and describe as editorialization.
The US population is 300 million so I would want to know whether 54 is a lot or a few. 54 excess means we expected to get N, but instead we got N+54. So my first question is: what is N? Are we over by a few percent, or by a factor of 20, or what?
See? You’re arguing over a word without bothering to read the article or understand the statistic.
The question “what is N” doesn’t make sense here. Excess child deaths doesn’t mean we expect N deaths and are okay with that…
Let me explain:
Take the actual U.S. child deaths.
Compute a counterfactual N* = how many would have died if the U.S. had the same age-specific child mortality rates as peer rich countries.
Excess = Actual − N*. It’s the avoidable difference, not an acceptable target.
That’s why the piece says ~316,000 excess child deaths (≈54 per day) from 2007–2022, those are deaths above what we’d expect if U.S. kids had peer-country risk.
And if you want scale: U.S. kids weren’t a few percent worse off. In 2014 they were ~1.6× more likely to die than peers; by 2022 it was ~2.3×—that’s 60% to 130% higher risk, not “a factor of 20,” but nowhere near “just a little bit” either. It’s staggering!
If a toy number helps: suppose peers have 25 deaths per 100k children in a year and the U.S. has ~58 per 100k. Apply those rates to the U.S. child population and you’d “expect” ~N* at the peer rate but observe far more; the gap between them is the excess. The study’s bottom line is that this gap averaged ~54 preventable child deaths every day over 16 years.
In other words, the US is a third world country.