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PaperclipPerfector  2mo ago (text post)   28375 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 11, 2024

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I don't know man, Sweden does that too and includes things like getting shot and cancer. If you exclude those you get an adjusted rate of <2 deaths per 100k births.

Maternal morality rates will largely correlate with obesity rates because Class 2+ obesity is associated with more than a 3X risk of mortality. Interestingly, underweight women have a lower risk of mortality.

I don't know how close this tightens up American and Swedish data, but it's going to be a giant difference-maker. If you have a population that has plenty of women with BMIs that are 35+, you're going to wind up with much, much more maternal mortality than a place where people in that group are quite rare.

I agree, it seems likely to me that most of not all of the health disparities between the US and Europe is due to that rather than meaningfully different levels of care.

That said... I've heard obstetricians specifically complain about the level of US care.

A huge part of that is the US health care system financially discouraging many patients with no or poor insurance coverage to have regular checkups during pregnancy.

That is in line with the rich white parts of the usa. Comparing single tiny countries is always silly. All of Europe is a much more accurate and useful comparison.

But the poorest parts of the US are about as wealthy as the UK and Germany in nominal GDP and ahead in purchasing power. The real question is "why can Europe with its Alabama-tier GDP per capita in the nice parts get results on par with like, Massachusetts".

43% obesity prevalence in USA vs. 13% in Europe.

Obesity is the biggest factor in maternal mortality by f̶a̶t̶ far. It is pretty much the largest factor in most health outcomes.

It ain't the health care, it is the care about health/cheap food/culture, car culture etc...etc...

The fact that we do so well despite being fat as hell is an amazing testament to our robust healthcare system.

But Americans have insistently told us europoors about how virtually all of Europe is poorer than virtually all of America anyway, over and over again.

"All of Europe" includes a large number of countries that, comparatively recently (merely a few decades ago) went through the failure and collapse of an entire economic system.

Well yah' are. It is mostly lifestyle/cultural diseases that are killing off our poorest. Food is too cheap and too delicious, alcohol and drugs are cheap and plentiful even for the impoverished. This creates worse outcomes than being actually too poor to afford to kill yourself. Rice and beans are very healthy!

I love visiting Europe, it makes my lower middle class ass feel rich! I also loving bringing tipping culture over. We get amazing service because they know the stupid americans will actually tip!

It is less than half the adjusted rate of the rich white parts of America...

Not with this new study knocking rates down to 1/3 of the claims, not in the actual rich parts. My state keeps pretty good records and for example between 2018 and 2021 had a grand total of 9 pregnancy related deaths due to direct or indirect obstetric causes in 4 years. All of the deaths were in the lower socioeconomic strata with most on some kind of state welfare, unmarried, smoking during pregnancy, drug use, high BMI etc..

It isn't a maternal care medical system issue, it is a pre-existing health problem issue. That says other bad things about american society perhaps, but not our maternal care practices in healthcare settings.

I also can't find any info for sweden claiming less than 2 per 100k closest I could find was about 5 per.

I think we're in enough of a lower bound to agree that maternal mortality is not a large issue in either case.

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