Live data from Hacker News

Pregnancy-Related Deaths: Data from Maternal Mortality Review Committees

cdc.gov

121–130 of 187 posts

Re: Pregnancy-Related Deaths: Data from Maternal Mortality Review Committees

#121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not sure where you ate getting that comparison. 2 mins on Google tells me [1] that ireland for example has a ppp per capita gdp of 79k vs USA average of 63k. Which would seem to imply that the first country in EU I compared with is significantly higher than at least some of us states? And that isn't a recent development. The choice isn't about getting massively poorer, it's just whether you want to be able to look yo…

That's nominal, severely outdated, and severely misleading. Ireland is the third richest [1] country in the world on paper as far as GDP/capita PPP measures, while in reality the household income/capita is a small fraction of that. The reason their GDP is so high is that hundreds of multinationals (including Google, Facebook, Apple, etc) filter large sums of money through Ireland in tax avoidance schemes. It's one of…

Ireland was probably a bad example. And agree GDP is a silly metric. A lot of macroeconomic metrics seem to be :-( . But comparing GNI per captia [1] (which AFAIK excludes profits from multinationals) Ireland is at more or less the same level as US (slightly ahead in 2021 apparently but only slightly). So I think my point still stands?

As for national incomes - see my comment below but unless you are subtracting out costs for healthcare and other services offered to all citizens that are not offered by the US government you are not comparing apples to apples either.

[1] https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GNP.PCAP.CD?location...

Re: Pregnancy-Related Deaths: Data from Maternal Mortality Review Committees

#122

The rate of maternal deaths in the US far outpaces that for other industrial countries. [0] Likely related to a racial divide in healthcare infrastructure? [0] https://tcf.org/content/commentary/worsening-u-s-maternal-he...

It’s hard to separate that from the US’s nasty combo of outlier poverty + healthcare that’s non-free at the point of service. Doesn’t bode well for populations disproportionately in and near poverty…

But (to be fair and balanced) one pro of the US’s system that other countries don’t have is that black and white people (and all other races) are allowed to use their HSAs as a tax shelter for their investments.

Re: Pregnancy-Related Deaths: Data from Maternal Mortality Review Committees

#123
post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Its difficult to find countries with so liberal abortion laws as in America. As an European it amazes me that so many people think abortion at late stages is "Business as usual".

I mean, this is a lie. Both in terms of late stage abortion being "business as usual" in USA and in terms of late stage abortion not being done in Europe. Laws vary between countries, but basically Poland is not Europe. Generally you can get late stage abortion for variety for health issues (abd even social ones). Also, you won't be denied prescribed medicine you need for pregnancy unrelated condition just because yo…

It's safe to say its 12 weeks in America, your conservatives lately proposed 15 weeks that is more generous than the average if EU.

Re: Pregnancy-Related Deaths: Data from Maternal Mortality Review Committees

#124
post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Its difficult to find countries with so liberal abortion laws as in America. As an European it amazes me that so many people think abortion at late stages is "Business as usual".

I mean, this is a lie. Both in terms of late stage abortion being "business as usual" in USA and in terms of late stage abortion not being done in Europe. Laws vary between countries, but basically Poland is not Europe. Generally you can get late stage abortion for variety for health issues (abd even social ones). Also, you won't be denied prescribed medicine you need for pregnancy unrelated condition just because yo…

>Generally you can get late stage abortion for variety for health issues

Isn't this true in even the most extremely anti abortion states of the US?

Re: Pregnancy-Related Deaths: Data from Maternal Mortality Review Committees

#125

When a drug company does a study that shows that their drug helps some condition (and should therefore be bought by consumers and their insurance companies), we are naturally sceptical. But when a group of public health researchers "find" that spending more money on public health measures could "prevent" deaths, we somehow take it at face value. The uk equivalent report is much more nuanced - note the use of "might h…

I do still see those causes of death as preventable, just the prevention like starts many orders before the mother. Things like social safety nets which prevent crime and homicide, effective drug addiction treatment, and more generally giving people some hope instead of the endless negativity and nihilism that has been spread for at least six years now.

Well, the united kingdom has a much more elaborate and complete "social safety net" and yet their maternal mortality report has similar conclusions to ours. The question is always what else are we willing to give up in order to pay for that? Would you be willing to have a 10% lower effective income to save a million lives every year in the US? What about to save just 1 life? Or what if you had to have a 50% lower income in order to save that 1 life? Is it still worth it? Everything is much easier if we are just relying on the mythical "other people" to pay for these things regardless of cost.

Re: Pregnancy-Related Deaths: Data from Maternal Mortality Review Committees

#126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can prevent some mental health conditions by caring properly for the mother, for example a mother struggling to pay rent or unable to access necessary medical care is naturally going to be at higher risk of conditions like depression and if you improve her circumstances it's possible that the depression might at least abate for a while. Lots of people who are managing mental health conditions will spiral if their…

> You can prevent some mental health conditions by caring properly for the mother, By that definition, cancer is preventable. Actually, nearly every possible cause of death is preventable if you're definition is "doing something might reduce risk factors". That's not the normal usage of "preventable death".

[deleted]

Re: Pregnancy-Related Deaths: Data from Maternal Mortality Review Committees

#127
post #72

I remember years ago when I was studying various aspects of the health insurance market, there was one thing that really, truly alarmed me: the amount of Medicaid money spent on pregnancy-related care. It was shocking to me. Pregnant women who don't see their doctors regularly end up costing the system an absolute fortune. It is a sad plague among many of the poor who have lots of problems themselves, a big one being…

And now, we’re going to force a lot of women who agree that they have no business having kids, to have kids.

Would it be nice if they’d had the forethought, budget and/or power in their relationships to reliably use birth control? Yes, and not just because of unwanted kids, but because their lives would be all around better. When I say “budget,” I don’t just mean the direct cost of birth control, but all the stuff around it, like doctor’s appointments to get and maintain the prescription.

But those things don’t line up for a lot of women in America, and now we’ve taken away the main safety valve. Few of them can afford to fly to friendlier states on short notice - they’re often in the kind of jobs where you can’t just call in sick for a few days and expect to have a job to go back to.

Gonna be a fun next 20+ years.

Re: Pregnancy-Related Deaths: Data from Maternal Mortality Review Committees

#128
post #36
post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not just banning abortion, but any medicine that could maybe possibly be used as an abortifacient, even if it is normally prescribed medicine for something else. Some women suffering from arthritis can't get methotrexate for example.

Not just that, but planning to make contraception illegal. Probably sex-ed too.

Any sort of useful sex ed was out of the question when I was in public high school in the late 90s in not-urban Texas. We got plenty of horror stories around premarital sex, but absolutely no information about birth control or the meaning of consent.

Shockingly, I have several classmates who were grandmothers before I became a mother.

Re: Pregnancy-Related Deaths: Data from Maternal Mortality Review Committees

#130

It's interesting that they don't discuss one easy way to prevent pregnancy complications for both mother and child: don't be obese or overweight See https://www.nature.com/articles/pr9201134 From the Nature article: "Obesity is associated with increased risk of almost all pregnancy complications: gestational hypertension, preeclampsia, gestational diabetes mellitus, delivery of large-for-GA infants, and higher incide…

People can always be healthier (and patients that meet weight-based diagnostic criteria are, AFAIK, informed about their elevated risk and advised to lose weight pretty reliably). I think this study seeks to identify additional intervention that would save lives with our current population - not project about how few people would die given some unrealized set of overall public health stats.

[deleted]
Post reply on HN