Editorial: The most dangerous wealthy nation to be born into? The U.S.A.

As funding renewal for the Children’s Health Insurance Program continues to languish in Congress, a study published last week in the journal Health Affairs illustrates how badly the United States takes care of its children. Compared with 19 other economically developed nations, the study says, the United States is “the most dangerous of wealthy nations for a child to be born into.”

Among the 20 industrialized nations studied, the United States ranked worst in childhood mortality. A child born here is 70 percent more likely to die before his 20th birthday than a child born in the 19 economic peer nations. Over the 50-year study period between 1960 and 2010, an estimated 622,000 American children died who might have lived had they been born in some other wealthy nation.

This shameful news comes as no surprise to epidemiologists. They’ve followed the annual numbers published by the World Health Organization and the global Human Mortality Database. But it may come as a shock to many Americans who’ve been told they have the best health care in the world.

Maybe, for those who can afford it. But 18 percent of U.S. children are part of families that officially live in poverty. Very often their mothers have had poor prenatal care, if they’ve had any at all. Premature babies are far more common here than in peer countries, and infant mortality is 76 percent higher.

While children of poor parents are eligible for Medicaid, their parents often aren’t, and the kids don’t get signed up. Some 9 million children whose working parents are not eligible for Medicaid are covered by the CHIP program — or they will be if Congress stops dithering.

All of the other developed nations in the study — Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Iceland, Ireland, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland and the United Kingdom — provide some form of universal health care.

The study’s authors, led by Dr. Ashish Thakrar of the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, say U.S. kids face other health challenges: high rates of childhood obesity, motor vehicle accidents, suicide and drug overdoses. The U.S. risk of gun death for children is 82 times greater than in peer nations. It’s a terrible gauntlet we ask our kids to walk.

In the early years of the study, the United States did better than other developed nations. That began to change in the 1970s and has steadily gotten worse in parallel with rising income inequality in the years since Ronald Reagan’s presidency.

On a per capita basis, the United States spends more on health care than any other nation in the world. We just have worse outcomes. There aren’t many worse outcomes than a dead child.