Last year the state spent more than $170 million to address maternal and infant death, yet rates of infant and fetal mortality, as well as preterm and low-weight births, haven’t improved much since a decade ago.
In the last decade, the state’s retention rate of physicians post-residency has declined. The Legislature hopes that funding 700 additional slots for medical school graduates, at $100,000 each, will incentivize the doctors to stay.
Health insurance premiums in the state have risen 49 percent in the last decade, which may be a result of industry business mergers. More than 80 percent of residents are worried about affording health care in the future.
Kate Cox sued for permission to end her 20-week pregnancy after receiving a genetic diagnosis that made the baby’s survival unlikely. A judge’s ruling has given legal and medical experts little clarity about when an abortion may be administered.
Nationally, more than a quarter of paramedics leave their jobs every year. Calls for ambulance services in Santa Clara County, Calif., have increased by 25 percent over the past three years.
For five decades, Idaho has been putting mental health patients into prisons, despite receiving 14 notices that it needs a secure mental health unit that is not a prison.
A group of state lawmakers, advocates and parents are working to change a Medicaid rule that limits psychiatric hospital stays to 15 days a month, but the change would need $7.2 million annually and federal approval.
The state has dropped more than 130,000 of its 500,000 Medicaid beneficiaries since April and about 30 percent of those disenrolled were left uninsured, which could be a bad sign for the rest of the nation.
Traumatic injury is the top killer of children and adults under the age of 45, claiming a life approximately every three-and-a-half minutes. Five states in the West have no Level I trauma centers; three other states have just one or two.
Data shows that about 285,000 women live in contraceptive deserts across the state, areas where contraceptive services don’t meet the needs of the public. The state also has one of the highest rates of pregnancies that are unwanted or wanted later.
When Arkansas expanded Medicaid in 2014, it used expansion dollars to buy private insurance for uninsured residents, making thousands more eligible for coverage. Georgia is considering a similar idea as a way to roll back hospital regulations.
Since the end of the pandemic-era continuous Medicaid renewals, 1.4 million Texans have been dropped from the federal health insurance program and 58 percent of them have been children.
Long-term nursing home care could easily cost more than $100,000 a year without Medicaid and 90 percent of people have said it would be impossible or very difficult to pay that much.
The question is whether this is a one-year blip or part of a more concerning shift, but it reflects hard truths about the state of our infant and maternal health care.
Lack of human connection is bad for your health. Responding to an advisory from the U.S. Surgeon General that a loneliness epidemic is affecting half of all Americans, San Antonio has been pushing out resources to help build bonds between community members.
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