AMERICAN ISSUES PROJECT

Ava Isabella Stinson was born at St. Joseph's Hospital in Hamilton, Ontario on Thursday of last week. Ava was 13 weeks premature. She weighed only two-pounds, four-ounces at birth. Ava needed special care and equipment to keep her alive. Unfortunately, there were no open neonatal intensive care beds for her at St. Joesph's Hospital. In fact, there were no open neonatal care beds in her entire Canadian province. Ava had to be transferred to the United States. CP24 reported on Little Ava's ordeal:

A critically-ill premature-born baby from Hamilton is all alone in a Buffalo, N.Y., hospital after she was turned away for treatment at local facility and transferred across the border without her parents, who don't have passports.

Ava Stinson was born Thursday at St. Joseph's Hospital, 14 weeks premature.

A province wide search for an open neonatal intensive care unit bed came up empty, leaving no choice but to send the two pound, four ounce baby to Buffalo.

Her parents Natalie Paquette and Richard Stinson couldn't follow their child because as of June 1, a passport is required to cross the border into the United States.

They're having to approve medical procedures over the phone and are terrified something will happen to their baby before they get there.

The Canadian Consulate in Buffalo is providing advice and guidance to the first-time parents, and their local MP, New Democrat David Christopherson, is working to arrange emergency passports.

This was not an isolated incident. Hamilton's neonatal intensive care unit (NICU) is closed to new admissions about 50 percent of the time. The rest of the special-needs babies are sent elsewhere and often to the United States. Don Surber reported that this tends to be the rule rather than the exception:

Remember the Jepp quads? Thanks to socialized medicine, there was no hospital in the second-largest nation on Earth that could accommodate the quadruple birth and so Mrs. Jepp flew 325 miles from Calgary (population 1 million) to Great Falls, Mont. (population 56,000) to give birth. She may be Canadian, but her 4 daughters are American.

Well, it turns out the Jepp quads are not the exception, they are the rule. Rather than build enough neo-natal intensive care units to handle their preemies, the Canadian government ships mothers to the United States to give birth.

In fact, there were at least 40 mothers or their babies who were airlifted from British Columbia to the United States in 2007 because Canadian hospitals didn’t have room for the preemies in their neonatal units. Mark Steyn calls it the ten-month waiting list for the maternity ward.

But, Canada is not alone. In Holland, where they also have socialized medicine, they set an age limit for which premature babies will be given care. The Times Online reported that in Holland, doctors do not routinely administer intensive care to babies born before 25 weeks of pregnancy. Premature babies would not routinely be resuscitated if they fell below this age limit. Great Britain has also considered this policy due to the high cost of treating premature babies. This is truly unfortunate considering the fact that the survival chances have greatly improved recently for premature babies.

It should also be noted that premature babies that do not survive in countries where they have nationalized health care are often not included in determining infant mortality rates (deaths of infants less than 1 year of age per 1,000 live births). For example, if a child in Hong Kong or Japan is born alive but dies within the first 24 hours of birth, he or she is reported as a “miscarriage” and does not affect the country’s reported infant mortality rates. This is how The New York Times gets away with comparing the US infant mortality rate to the infant mortality rate in Cuba. These supporters of socialized medicine claim that the infant mortality rate in America proves that the US system is failing. They argue that nationalized health care is the reason why babies have a better survival rate in these countries. However, Dr. Linda Halderman explained that according to the way statistics are calculated in Canada, Germany, Norway and Austria, a premature baby weighing less than 500g is not considered a living child. Dr. Halderman argues that when the main determinant of mortality, weight at birth, is factored in, these countries have no better survival rates than the United States.

With Obamacare, Americans can expect a similar system as Canada, Great Britain or Western Europe. As we've seen with these socialized systems, some people will inevitably be denied the care they need to survive. No doubt, with Obamacare Americans will be forced to accept an inferior product with fewer choices. And, eventually, Canadians will have to find someplace else to send their premature babies.

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