When a baby is born too soon, it's hard to imagine that the infant would do better anywhere else in the world than in America. The most fragile preterm infants are housed in specialized intensive-care units and cared for by world-class experts. Prematurity cost the country some $26 billion in 2005, according to the U.S. Institute of Medicine. And yet for all the technology and expense, roughly 30,000rnAmerican babies under age 1 die each year. They die at a rate three times as high as in Singapore, which has the world's best infant survival-long considered a key indicator of a nation's overall level of health. In fact, the U.S.-ranked No. 30 in 2005-lags behind almost every other industrialized nation, behind Cuba, Hungary and Poland.
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