Word: infantalizes
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Experts agree that the prescription for lowering the infant-mortality rate is simple and can save money: all it takes is good prenatal care. Each dollar spent on the mother before delivery will save more than $3 spent on the infant for medical expenses during its first year. But this elementary arithmetic doesn't seem to add up for the Bush Administration, which is making no more than a symbolic gesture to attack a problem that has become a symbol of America's failure to cope with appalling poverty...
...called, has become the target of a classic inside-the-Beltway political battle, with the Office of Management and Budget feuding with parts of the divided Department of Health and Human Services, and Congress feuding with the Administration. Even members of a White House-appointed study group on infant mortality, who last summer prepared a no-nonsense plan costing less than one-tenth of 1% of the $600 billion spent annually on health care in the U.S., sound apologetic about not attacking the problem full force. "One can say it's not enough or it's not fast enough...
...while, child advocates actually believed that the Administration was serious. For one thing, the White House was interested enough in this national calamity to have appointed the task force to study it two years ago. Bush made the infant-death rate a campaign issue in 1988, promising at one point that "quality health services so critical for improving maternal and infant health will be available." HHS Secretary Dr. Louis Sullivan also considers reducing infant mortality a high-priority project. He calls the number of infant deaths in the U.S. "almost obscene for a country with the resources we have...
...latest statistics fully support his outrage. They show that, instead of improving at a steady pace, the nation's infant-mortality rate leveled off at 9.7 deaths per 1,000 births in 1989. It now stands at twice the rate of Japan and below that of 23 other countries, including less affluent ones like Spain and Singapore. More troubling, infant mortality remains one of the nation's starkest measures of the separation between blacks and whites: twice as many black babies as white die within their first year...
...unpublished report, which was leaked to the press last summer, the White House study recommended 18 steps costing a total of $500 million a year, including targeting 20 areas where infants die in especially high numbers. But the OMB scaled back the White House proposals to $171 million; instead of targeting 20 areas, it recommended 10. Worse, OMB decided that a large part of the money would come from other health programs for poor women and children. That penny-pinching tactic sparked an outcry that could be heard all the way down Pennsylvania Avenue. "It is absolutely Mephistophelian...