The forgotten children

This time of year depictions of the Baby Jesus in a manger are everywhere as a commercial cue, an object of worship, as a depiction of the essence of innocence. As a study published in the journal JAMA Network Open last month found, one in four child deaths after an emergency room visit in the U.S. were preventable because they resulted as a consequence of the reality that 80 percent of the nation’s hospitals were poorly equipped to handle pediatric cases. We need your help to stay independent Subscribe today to support Salon's progressive journalism A few weeks later, Baumgaertner reported yet another alarming trend—"from 2019 to 2021, the [U.S.} child death rate rose more steeply than it had in at least half a century” adding that came “despite all of the medical advances and public health gains” made over that same period. Dr. Coleen Cunningham, the chief pediatrician at Children’s Hospital of Orange County, told the Times that digging deeper into this data, the uptick was composed of cases in which the deaths were “almost always preventable.” “Deadly car accidents among tweens and teen climbed nearly 16 percent,” the Times reported. Newsweek reported, that in addition to the southern and some western states, that have all traditionally had elevated child poverty rates, we saw a 14 percent rate or higher in states with “high levels of wealth like Texas, California, New York and Florida.” Digging deeper into county-by-county level data compiled state by state by the United Way that looks at households that live nominally above the outdated federal poverty measure but struggle month to month to survive, we see a dystopian picture of a 21st-century feudalism taking hold.