Panel Urges Improved Care for Infants : Cites Need to ‘Put Children First’ With Preventive Medicine

The nation would save money at the same time it saves its children by redirecting resources to health care for pregnant women and their newborn infants, a federal commission said today.

“We spend vast amounts on a compassionate effort to save sick children when we could spend far less to assure they are born healthy,” said a report of the National Commission to Prevent Infant Mortality.

“No nation can long call itself great that does not put its children first,” said Sen. Lawton Chiles (D-Fla.), chairman of the panel, in a letter accompanying the report. The commission was created by Congress in July, 1987.

The report says 40,000 infants die each year in the United States before they reach their first birthday, and that without changes, “in the next 13 years we will lose more American infants than we have lost soldiers in all the wars fought by the nation in this century.

“These facts would be sad enough were it not for the additional fact that at least half of the deaths are preventable.”

A child born in the United States has a poorer chance of surviving his or her first year than one born in 19 other industrialized nations, the report said.

The report makes two fundamental recommendations:

--”We must provide universal access to early maternity and pediatric care for all mothers and infants. . . . Employers must make available health insurance coverage that includes maternity and well-baby care. Government must assume responsibility for those who lack private insurance or are unable to pay.

--”We must initiate immediately a sustained, broad-based effort to make the health and well-being of mothers and infants a national priority and give them public attention and resources they deserve.”

The panel recommended that Congress raise appropriations for six separate programs that would benefit pregnant women and their newborn children--such as the supplemental food program for women, infants and children and the child immunization program--but it gave no figures.