Mother's Day: What Moms need is health care

May 15, 2017

By MBPC Staff

We hope moms and moms-to-be around the state had a wonderful Mother’s Day.

Because we love our moms and we are a female-led organization, our team spent time looking into how the House GOP bill to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act (ACA) might affect women, and moms specifically.

The ACA changed the landscape for women’s health insurance coverage. As we await the Senate’s version of a bill, it is crucial to understand the particular damage that ACA repeal poses for women’s health and economic security.

We know that much attention has been given to the provision of the AHCA that allows states to waive the “essential health benefits” coverage for individual market plans. Which basically means that pregnancy, c-sections, or injuries from domestic violence are included as pre-existing conditions and subject moms and women to significantly higher premiums.

However the issue of fundamentally changing Medicaid is equally as detrimental to moms in our state and country. As it stands, the House health bill would have devastating consequences for the nearly 40 million women across the country who rely on Medicaid. In Montana, 129,200 women are enrolled in Medicaid and 35% of births are financed by Medicaid.

The House-passed bill would slash Medicaid by more than $800 billion over ten years by effectively eliminating Medicaid expansion to low-income adults and imposing a “per capita cap” on the program.

Women would bear a disproportionate impact of these cuts because they are not only the majority of Medicaid beneficiaries, but are also the primary utilizers of family planning and maternity care, benefits that could be eliminated with devastating federal cuts to Medicaid.

In addition, Medicaid expansion gave many women not raising children access to coverage and offered continuous coverage to new mothers who had qualified while pregnant but would not have qualified after their pregnancy. Ending the expansion would take these benefits away.

There are a few other benefits the ACA gave women that could be lost with repeal. One is breastfeeding. The ACA covers lactation support and counseling, equipment and supplies, such as pumps, and infrastructure, such as pump rooms and break time. The other is access to birth control which provides health benefits for women and children, improves women’s ability to control whether and when they have a child, and fosters women’s ability to participate in education and the workforce on an equal footing with men. The ACA was a total game-changer when it comes to access to birth control for women because it removed the cost barriers. Women no longer have to pay out-of-pocket costs or choose between paying for birth control and paying for other necessities, like groceries and utilities.

The ACA and Medicaid have been hugely beneficial for women’s health. With the potential repeal hanging above us, women – and mom’s – have a lot to lose. While the future is uncertain, we want to make sure that women and moms continue to have access to affordable health care. We encourage all moms, women, and the men in their lives to contact our Montana Senators and tell them to reject any health bill that causes people to lose coverage, caps or cuts Medicaid, ends the Medicaid expansion, or takes away critical protections.