As we prepare to celebrate Mother’s Day this weekend, and as the coronavirus creates new challenges and risks for many women and families, I want to share our new policy brief about the helpful state health programs available to Texas women and the significant limits on whom or what they cover.
Let me say up front what’s at stake here.
We believe Texas must reduce the rates of infant mortality, premature births, low birth weight babies, birth defects, pregnancy complications, maternal depression, maternal deaths, and racial disparities in birth outcomes. It’s the right thing to do, and it will save the state money by preventing million-dollar stays in the NICU and other costs.
We wrote this policy brief because women’s lack of access to health care — before pregnancy, during the first trimester, and after pregnancy — contributes to these challenges, as noted by the Maternal Mortality and Morbidity Review Committee.
But we did something a little different with this policy brief. Typically, we include plenty of policy recommendations in our policy briefs, but this time we just focused on illustrating the problem. Why?
Because, over and over, we discover that Texans incorrectly believe there are more health care options available to Texas women. The fact is, while Medicaid for parents, Medicaid for pregnant women, and Healthy Texas Women provide very important support to women in our state, many Texans mistakenly assume the programs cover more health services or cover women in more situations than they actually do. Frankly, I can understand why so many people get this wrong. It’s just hard to believe how little is available to Texas women with low incomes.
Take a quick look at this table — particularly each red X — and you’ll start to see what I mean about the gaps:
Largely due to these state policy decisions, Texas has the highest uninsured rate in the nation for women of childbearing age, right around 25 percent.
Coronavirus and this recession are likely to exacerbate the problem, as many Texas women lose their jobs and their health insurance. Meanwhile, many of the moms and other women who are still working these days — as child care educators, home health aides, janitors, grocery store cashiers, and so on — also have no way to get health insurance.
There are clear steps that state leaders and the Legislature should take to close these gaps. Instead of knocking new moms off of their health insurance two months after childbirth, Texas leaders can extend their Medicaid coverage to 12 months. In fact, during the pandemic, Texas is temporarily allowing women to stay enrolled longer than two months. Texas leaders can accept Medicaid expansion funding from the federal government to provide an insurance option to adults below the poverty line. State leaders can make other changes to the duration, eligibility, and scope of services in these programs.
This week, as we buy flowers for the moms in our lives, let’s also recommit to making sure our state policies provide women with access to the services they need in order to stay healthy, have a healthy pregnancy, and have a healthy baby.