Why the US is 'the most dangerous of wealthy nations for a child to be born into'

[Belsnickel]

I found it interesting that the infant mortality and teen (15-19) mortality were what they were. It's hard to tie those to poverty, necessarily. The teen one, specifically, more about stupidity. I'd like to see more of the data on this.

Lucky for me, working at a university, I have access to the full article! I don't think most of you will get to download the full thing, but here: https://www.healthaffairs.org/doi/abs/10.1377/hlthaff.2017.0767

Edit: It seems they may be jumping to causation out of correlation:

Quote:An Institute of Medicine report on US health from an international perspective determined that the nation’s poor health outcomes stem from adverse socioeconomic conditions, risky health behaviors, and a fragmented health system, all in the context of a weak social safety net that fails to buffer vulnerable populations from the impacts of these circumstances on health.4 Our findings on the child mortality disadvantage support this verdict. The disadvantage developed between the late 1960s and the mid-1980s, at precisely the time when relative socioeconomic status for children fell in the US compared to other wealthy countries. The US has had one of the highest rates of child poverty among wealthy nations since at least the early 1980s,4 and in the mid-1980s child poverty increased by almost one-third in the US.32 US children also have performed among the lowest of wealthy nations in educational outcomes since at least the mid-1960s, when international comparisons were first conducted.33 Both poverty and education have repeatedly been shown to track along a gradient of health in children, with lower incomes and lower education correlated with worse health outcomes.34–36

These two phenomena—increased relative poverty and stagnating educational attainment—occurred in the context of a relatively weak social safety net for children. During the period we analyzed, the US spent significantly less of its gross domestic product per capita on child health and welfare programs, compared to other wealthy nations.37 More equitable social policies have been shown to mitigate the accumulating disadvantages that can lead to poor health outcomes in children.38 In fact, two studies found strong associations between the style of welfare regime in a country and health outcomes. Anglo-Saxon/Liberal nations (with means-tested and residual welfare regimes) performed worse than both Conservative (with wage-earner social insurance models) and Social Democratic (with universalist models) regimes. One study found that governing style accounted for 47 percent of the variation in life expectancy,39 and another found that it accounted for 20 percent of the variation in infant mortality and 10 percent of the variation in low birthweight.40