Does better healthcare mean more babies? A look at the USA and India
Introduction
In a world full of new innovation and modern medicine, Why are babies still dying early? And why are countries not providing the healthcare needed for their citizens? Before modern medicine, a common familial issue was the mortality rate of infants. In most cases, mothers would bear many children, around 7–8 in their lifetime, because most would not make it to adulthood. This was mostly due to disease and the unhygienic practices of older times. Nowadays, mothers are less inclined to have that many children, and modern medical technology makes it easier for babies to survive their initial birth and grow up into adulthood. Modern medicine has made it possible for these children to live long and happy lives, so why are there some places in the world where infant mortality is still so high? In this article I am going to explore the USA and India’s infant mortality rates as well as their expenditures on health. A country that has put more money into health should have more resources to aid these infants in making it through childhood.
Data
The data used in my analysis of this issue is from WorldBank.org. This website has a dataset called the World Development Indicators and features many series of different aspects of world governments. A few examples being GDP, debt, unemployment, and more. The dataset also has variables for different time periods. For my argument I chose to look at two series, infant mortality rates and health expenditure in order to find a correlation between the two. I looked at two large countries, the USA and India, during the years of 2010 to 2018 as that was the last year that data was available. I’m using these two series to show that health expenditures are necessary for the survival of infants into childhood and governments need to provide adequate care for their citizens.
Findings
With the developments made in modern medicine, people are staying healthier and living longer lives. This is only the case when an individual makes it through one of the most intricate and dangerous processes that is childbirth. A process which since the dawn of man has been deadly and dangerous for the mother, child, and the rest of the family. In today’s age, the chances of pregnancies going wrong have been decreased immensely due to the practices and knowledge of our doctors. Although the world overall has made great advancements, the actual implementations of this new medical knowledge varies between different countries. This is due to the limitations on resources, money, and education in different countries. The countries that seemed to be most interesting were the USA and India. These countries are similar in size and population, but differ greatly in their expenditure priorities and cultures.
Looking at the data from 2010–2018, both countries exhibited a huge decrease in their infant mortality rates, which shows that they are moving in the right direction for their people. In general, both countries are working towards helping their citizens survive into adulthood, as shown in the data with both rates of infant mortality dropping steadily. It is important to note that there is a large gap between the two countries in their rates. When comparing these two countries, it is important to remember the huge differences in population. The United States has around 330 million citizens and India has well over 1 billion people, so of course they are going to have very different rates because in India there are just more mothers giving birth. However, this is not the only reason for this drastic difference.
There are many factors that affect infant mortality as stated above, one important factor is the amount of money each government spends on health care. The data shows the percentage of each countries’ GDP spent on healthcare, and there is a big difference between how much India spends, and how much the United States spends. The USA spends about 16 percent of their GDP on healthcare, and India spends about 3% on average. India needs to rework their spending budget to favor their healthcare. For a country of that size and scale, they should be spending much more on healthcare especially since they are losing around 800 thousand to a million children per year to childbirth complications.
In the United States on the other hand, they lose around 22,000 babies during childbirth. For a population of 300 million, this is a small section of the general public, and the number is decreasing by thousands every year. The US spends around 16.3% on healthcare, which is about 5 times more than India. This clearly shows that the more you put into care for your citizens, the more are going to live healthier lives. In order for India to keep up with the US and other countries, the first step is to make sure they can produce healthy and happy individuals.
Overall, there is a large difference in how the United States spends their money, and how India does. In the case of health expenditure, the US spends nearly 5 times as much, and results of this are seen in the infant mortality rates. Comparing both countries, the US had a lot less infant mortality than India. This is due to a number of things like population size, resources available, and health expenditure. With India spending much less than the US on health, they are experiencing more mortality of babies during birth. It is evident that India needs to make a change in their expenditure. However, they are on the right track, with a 20% decrease in this rate just over the 2010–2018 period. Both countries are taking steps in the right direction to overcome this issue.
