Our maternal mortality rate is a national embarrassment
Through indifference and cruelty, the United States kills new moms at a rate unheard of elsewhere in the developed world
The CDC just released the latest data on maternal mortality in the U.S. and it’s bad: for every 100,000 births, 24 moms died due to either pregnancy, delivery or their associated complications in 2020. That’s up by close to half just from 2017, when the rate stood at 17 deaths per 100k births. Comparable data prior to 2017 isn’t really available, as that was the year the CDC finally got its act together on tallying maternal deaths in a comprehensive manner.
The United States is an outlier relative to our wealthy peers: their rates are low and trending downward, while ours are high and increasing. Data from the World Bank, while not as recent as the CDC figures, suggest that American moms are twice as likely as those in South Korea to die due to pregnancy and childbirth, four times as likely as those in the U.K., and a whopping 12 times as likely as those in Norway.
The mortality rate for black American moms (55 per 100k) is nearly three times higher than that of white ones (19), reflecting the staggering disparities still present in our largely privatized healthcare system. That system is, in turn, responsible for most of the difference between the U.S. and other rich nations: while health care, including maternal care, in most of those places is universal, affordable, and guaranteed by law, here in the U.S. we’re kind of on our own: maybe your workplace offers good insurance, maybe it doesn’t. Maybe you can afford good maternal care or maybe you can’t. In a country where one in four people put off necessary medical care on account of cost, you’re going to have a lot of preventable death.
The 2020 maternal mortality numbers in the U.S. likely reflect the effects of the pandemic, which upended the American health care system and exposed the general shabbiness of our country’s safety nets. Subsequent data may show similar effects in our peer nations, although generally speaking they’ve done a better job handling the pandemic than we have — again, in no small way due to their universal health care systems.
At any rate, this is the country our policymakers have chosen to build for us: one which kills its new mothers at rates unthinkable in other rich nations, all in the name of maximizing profits for medical systems, insurance companies and their shareholders. The Democratic party, to its credit, has attempted to address the problem, although primarily via half-assed boondoggles like Obamacare.
The Republicans, meanwhile, have offered next to nothing in the way of solutions and worked to stymie healthcare reform at nearly every juncture. Mitch McConnell has refused to outline the party’s agenda if they retake Congress this year, and with good reason: Rick Scott released a Republican policy agenda for the coming years yesterday morning, but many of the provisions — like raising taxes on the poor and naming a wall on the southern border after Donald Trump — proved to be so laughably unpopular that Scott was backtracking by evening.
Nevertheless, Scott’s shambolic collection of bullet points is the closest thing to an actual platform the GOP has released in years, and it’s notable that other than a passing reference to veterans it doesn’t mention health care at all.
I simply can not understand why the Democratic party establishment doesn't support Medicare for All?? It seems so obvious to folks who actually put working class people first... like AOC and other non-establishment Dems (Justice Dems for example). The Republican party is a lost cause, but the establishment Dems somehow forgot their whole purpose: to fight for working class people.