Hacker News Reader

I'll say this here: Sorry, I stated the US had an appalling infant mortality rate, and in fact it actually has a very good one. I was thinking of the Per Capita Infant Mortality rate, which IIRC the formula goes Per Capita GDP / 1,000 x IMR. This places the US rate as almost double of the UK's rate (IIRC), due to the fact that the US economy should be capable of providing better health care to infants than the UK. This test is only really good for developed nations as poor countries can end up looking the best, due to the fact that they can have Per Capitas below $1000.

Exactly. I liked quite a lot of what he said, but that "appalling" was appalling. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_infant_mor...

Iceland IMR (the lowest) is 2.9, and the US is 6.3. Wow! That means twice as many kids in the US die as Iceland! That's appalling! But we're in the noise floor here. 0.03% vs 0.06% is noise floor, It's certainly not appalling.

Some sources is given in the post above. The USA has a marginally larger infancy mortality rate than some European countries.