Not to be heartless or anything, but let’s leave aside the dead babies. In international comparisons of health care, the infant mortality rate is a crucial indicator of a nation’s standing, and the United States’ position at No. 28, with seven per 1,000 live births-worse than Portugal, Greece, the Czech Republic, Northern Ireland and 23 other nations not exactly known for cutting-edge medical science-is a tragedy and an embarrassment. Much of the blame for this abysmal showing, however, goes to socioeconomic factors: poor, uninsured women failing to get prenatal care or engaging in behaviors (smoking, using illegal drugs, becoming pregnant as a teen) that put fetuses’ and babies’ lives at risk. You can look at 28th place and say, yes, it’s terrible, but it doesn’t apply to my part of the health-care system-the one for the non-poor insured. That, in a nutshell, is why support for health-care reform is fragile and shallow. Yes, many people of goodwill support extending coverage to the 47 million Americans who, according to the Census Bureau, had no insurance for all or part of 2006. An awful lot of the insured, though, worry that messing with the system to bring about universal coverage, even […]