AAP News Vol. 2 No. 3 March 1986, p. 22
© 1986 American Academy of Pediatrics
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Baby no dough: Financing the care of seriously ill newborns

Concern for the weak and the downtrodden is one of the tap roots in the American landscape. Our Constitution provides all citizens with the right to the pursuit of happiness, but not happiness itself.

Among the newest Americans, the newly born with serious illness (about 2 percent of the 3.2 million babies born each year), pursuit of happiness is a distant agenda. Survival to one month of age is the near reality. When a baby is born prematurely in a hospital that is neither staffed nor equipped to provide newborn intensive care and when there is no bed available in the nearest regional center, calls shoot out to other regional centers within and sometimes outside the state of birth. The overload situation exists almost daily in every region in the United States.