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| 4/19/2006 1:00:00 PM | Email this article • Print this article | Not a case of infant mortality
 | Rob Crowe
Columnist
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My mother tells me far too often of my early days, of the things that happened shortly after she first brought me home from San Diego Naval Hospital.
Evidently I was fairly normal for a little while, but soon would nurse a while, then vomit everything I’d just swallowed. She took me to the hospital and evidently I was in pretty tough shape ’cause they kept me there and told her to go home and dry up. Me being breast fed, I probably wouldn’t survive the diagnosed case of pyloric stenosis.
Needless to say, the country girl from northern Minnesota didn’t believe the doctors. She bought a breast pump and kept her milk production up in anticipation of bringing a healthy baby home. The Naval doctors did their part, performing an operation as evidenced by a long scar on my right upper abdomen and here I am today, a fact I and, I hope, many of you are usually thankful for.
My Dad says the birth cost him about $10. I guess that is what the Navy charged its sailors for a delivery in 1954. He never said what the operation cost and I never asked.
I read with interest David Strand’s last column, wondering what he could possibly be calling a “big lie.” After reading it and the often outrageous claims laid down, I concluded that one “big lie” would be saying that the Democratic party is interested in doing anything about infant mortality. They are not.
The party will support no effort to effectively lower the number of abortions, refusing even to support elimination of grisly partial birth abortions, thus the seeming concern over the ghost claim of several thousand infants dying pales in comparison to the 1.3 million or so aborted (2004 estimate, Guttmacher Institute).
It is a classic case of the old proverb: strain at a gnat but swallow a camel. The other thing to note is that comparing infant mortality rates or any other statistic between nations is often like comparing poker hands between card sharks, a person is never really sure how much cheating is involved.
That being said, discussing the United States health care situation in a rational manner would be a good thing, but there seems to be little possibility of that. Calling obesity an epidemic is a misnomer – it is a lifestyle issue similar to tobacco use in some ways. It is not a disease simply because the liberal fundamentalists imply it is.
The fact the liberal fundamentalists all leave out when talking about U.S. health care is that the poor have health care, or at least government provided insurance if they qualify. This is provided through Medicaid and in Minnesota, the people with lower income jobs can get MinnesotaCare. I’ll part with many people of my own party about MinnesotaCare – I think it is a good program. I think the funding should be quite a bit different – taxing health care providers to fund this program isn’t my idea of a fair method. This essentially drives up the cost of health care for every other user of the system unless I’m sadly mistaken. At least it is there to provide coverage for people.
While I was researching this subject and reading comparisons, usually comparing the U.S. health care with European Union systems, invariably the liberal “experts” and “analysts” will say the U.S. system is skewed toward the “rich” rather than the poor. This is patently false.
In any system, the “rich” will get the coverage or simply pay for whatever health care they want. This is evidenced by the clientele of Minnesota’s own Mayo Clinic, many of which are reported to come from all over the world. It is the middle income people, I believe, who would be most likely to be uninsured, but not lacking in health care. Most probably they could get insurance if they wanted it, but choose not to.
This is not to say things couldn’t be better, but the problem is usually over-rated by those who wish to denigrate nearly everything American.
Many things could be done to improve the health care system of the United States, hysterical and unsubstantiated claims do nothing to positively contribute to the discussion.
Rob Crowe chairs the Aitkin County Republicans and raises kids and cows on a farm near Hill City.
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