not every health issue is a health care issue writes Steve Chapman in Health Care and Infant Mortality The Real Story Like life expectancy the subject of a previous column infant mortality is a function of many factors The more you look at the problem the less it seems to be correctable by a big new federal role in medical insurance and in fact the less it seems to be mainly a medical issue at all Comparing white Americans to Norwegians in his 1995 book The Tyranny of Numbers Nicholas Eberstadt a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington concluded that white America s higher rates of infant mortality are explained not by poverty as conventionally construed or by medical care but rather by the habits actions and indeed lifestyles of a critical portion of its parents Whites are not unique in those types of behavior African American babies are far more likely to die than white ones which is often taken as evidence that poverty and lack of health insurance are to blame That s entirely plausible until you notice another racial ethnic gap Hispanics of Mexican or Central or South American ancestry not only do consistently better than blacks on infant mortality they do better than whites Social disadvantage doesn t explain very much Nor does access to prenatal care as the health care critique implies It used to be assumed that if you assured that pregnant low income women could see a physician their infants would do much better Not necessarily