The Big Push for Midwives on the Hill!

If you are interested in supporting Certified Professional Midwives, PLEASE do all that you can to help us become a part of health care reform. The Big Push for Midwives are working hard to get Medicaid reimbursement for pregnant women choosing a Certified Professional Midwife as their care provider. Remember that out of hospital birth with a CPM is literally a fraction of the cost of a non-medicated vaginal hospital birth. The midwifery model of care works fabulously in many, many other countries. Help bring the U.S. up to speed on this issue!

The following was issued from The Big Push for Midwives:


We are happy to report a very successful Issue Briefing today, thanks to tons of phone calls and emails that you all sent—we have made a big impression on Capitol Hill and have captured the attention of our elected officials in DC, so thank you to everyone out there for a job well done!

But we can’t stop yet. Tomorrow brings the first critical deadline for getting the services of Certified Professional Midwives included in the first major reform plan to come out of the Senate Finance Committee to be crafted into a bill that will be sent Senate Health Committee within the next two weeks.

The plan calls for a significant expansion of Medicaid eligibility for pregnant women and for expanding the list of health care providers who are eligible for Medicaid reimbursement.

But guess who’s missing from the list? Certified Professional Midwives.

We need to act today by FLOODING the Senate Finance Committee with emails that send a simple, but very important, message

to this email address:

Health_Reform@ finance-dem. senate.gov

Here is our message:

Please add Certified Professional Midwives to the Improved Medicaid Provider list in Section 4 on page 24 of the Proposed Policy Options issued by the Senate Finance Committee.

We need to use that exact language because our request is very specific. Then please follow with one of two messages from the list below, using your own words:

• Certified Professional Midwives are specially trained as experts in out-of-hospital maternity care and deliver babies in private homes and in freestanding birth centers.
  

• The evidence consistently shows that low-risk women who plan out-of-hospital births under the care of Certified Professional Midwives experience outcomes equal to low-risk women who give birth in the hospital, but with far fewer costly and preventable interventions, including a five-fold decrease in cesarean surgery.
  

• Babies born to women under the care of Certified Professional Midwives experience significantly reduced rates of preterm birth and low birth weight—two of the primary contributing factors to infant mortality, racial and ethnic disparities in birth outcomes, and the costs associated with long-term care. The March of Dimes reports medical costs for one premature baby could cover a dozen healthy births.
  

• The state of Washington reports a savings of $3.1 million dollars over a period of two years to the state Medicaid system when women experiencing healthy, low-risk pregnancies give birth with licensed midwives instead of in the hospital.
  

• The recent Milbank Report conservatively estimates savings of $2.5 billion dollars a year if the cesarean surgery rate is brought down to 15% in the U.S.
  

• Certified Professional Midwives s are the only providers specially trained in out-of-hospital birth in the tragic event that hospitals become unsafe for healthy pregnant women during a disaster.
  

• If we increased the number of babies delivered by Certified Professional midwives in out-of-hospital settings by just 5 percent, we would save over a billion dollars each year.
  

We have found that virtually none of our federal legislators in DC, or their staff, know what Certified Professional Midwives are, what they do or even that they exist. So please use the full title, Certified Professional Midwives, repeatedly in your correspondence to your members of Congress.

We have a dedicated group of Pushers on the Hill today educating Congress about CPMs and gaining a lot of traction, but they need back-up from all of us here out in the states!

*Please note that the proposal in the Senate Finance Committee that will be crafted into legislation next week does NOT address licensure of midwives or other health care providers. Instead, it will determine which health care providers will be added to the expanded list of providers eligible to receive Medicaid reimbursement. We are asking the Senate Finance Committee to please add Certified Professional Midwives to that list.

Katherine Prown, PhD | Campaign Manager | TheBigPushForMidwiv es.org | 414.550.8025 | JOIN US on Facebook! | SIGN UP for PushAlerts