I am so sick of null hypothesis studies and random statistic slinging. It means nothing. Average obesity rates do not tell the whole story (even so an 8% increase is HUGE). You have to look at variance. If the U.S. has a much wider variance then there would be a greater amount of people with extreme obesity which would definitely affect health care outcomes.

> US is also a super bad infant mortality rate compared to other countries:

Access to healthcare is quite low in the US compared to most of the 50 countries ahead of us. We also have higher levels of poverty, ESPECIALLY for a lot of parents/children.

GDP is irrelevant. The paper says:

> In 2013, the US infant mortality rate (IMR) ranked 51st internationally, comparable to Croatia, despite an almost three-fold di erence in GDP per capita

If you have high GDP per capita, and more poor people per capita, and health care is not free - you're going to have more people not accessing health care and suffering the consequences.

In this world - I would expect infant mortality to be much higher even when the healthcare systems are equal.

which too seems like it's probably a complicated issue, from one of your papers.

> Consistent with past evidence that has focused on comparing the US with Scandinavian countries, we find that birth weight can explain around 75% of the US IMR disadvantage relative to Finland or Belgium. However, birth weight can only explain 30% of the US IMR disadvantage relative to Austria or the UK