US Maternal Mortality Rate Exemplifies Moral Bankruptcy of Our Health System

My friend, Dr. Don Frey, recently published America’s DWP Crisis: Dying While Pregnant (DWP) on his blog, “A Family Doctor Looks at the World”. It leads with shocking and distressing statistics about the US maternal mortality rate, which has long been the highest in the “developed world” and has been steadily increasing. Citing a recent article in JAMA, Trends in State-Level Maternal Mortality by Racial and Ethnic Group in the United States (LG Fleszar, AG Bryant, CO Johnson, July 3, 2023), he  points out that in the 20 years from 1999 to 2019 US maternal mortality more than doubled (it actually went up 2.5 times):

In every corner of the country, for every ethnic group, outcomes worsened.  By 2019, deaths per 100,000 pregnancies (the benchmark measure) had increased from 12.7 to 32.2.  For Black and American Indian women, the picture was much worse.  Their mortality skyrocketed to 55.4 and 49.2, respectively.

And this doesn’t even include deaths from accidents and homicide – the latter being the #1 cause of death for pregnant women in the US!

Let’s stop and think about that. In the rest of the OECD (Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, = wealthy) countries maternal mortality is going down. For the most recent reported years, it ranges from about 1.6 to 8.8, with most below 5. When we were at 12.7 we were way out of the picture. Now we are at 32.2! And our rates for minority women are like poor countries! Even though the maternal mortality rate is high and rising for all races and ethnicities, it is made even higher by the ridiculously high rates for some populations. In what conceivable way could this be compatible with the US having “the best healthcare in the world”, or anything approaching it? Only if you accept the definition of “well, the best healthcare is available for some people, who can afford it, but not even for most Americans”.

Dr. Frey points to several reasons why our “DWP” (and our dying-while-recently-pregnant, ie, post-partum) rate is so high, and they are valid, and addressing them would certainly significantly lower it. The major one is what we often refer to as “the social determinants of health”. This is a fine term, except it has almost become routine to cite them while we, as a country, continue to do little or nothing to address them. People are much more likely to have poor health status if they are financially poor, poorly nourished, poorly housed, poorly educated and live with ongoing danger and the fear that comes from it. And when those bad things happen in childhood, their risk continues higher for the rest of their lives. We call this “ACEs”, Adverse Childhood Events, and the higher number and degree of ACEs, the worse the outcome for not only those children but for the adults that they will become. Thus a person who grew up poor is likely to have worse health status as an adult than a neighbor who did not grow up poor, even if they end up with similar incomes and lifestyles. In addition to the ACEs that have their origin in poverty, there are others, ranging from growing up in a family with adults who abuse alcohol and other drugs, to parents’ divorce, to death of a parent, to physical and sexual abuse, that can occur in any socioeconomic group.

Dr. Frey also cites the number of states that have passed – and implemented – “anti-woman” laws, usually under the guise of being “anti-abortion”. While the legislators who propose and vote for them, and the state governments implementing them, would deny that they are anti-woman, the facts speak otherwise. A good example that Dr. Frey discusses, is

Last year in Missouri, for example, the legislature debated whether to outlaw surgery for ectopic pregnancies (an embryo that implants in the fallopian tube instead of the uterus), even though such pregnancies are 100% non-viable.  Apparently, the near-certainty of a mother’s tubal rupture, internal bleeding, sepsis, and death, wasn’t particularly important.

That law has not passed (so far) but many others have so limited access to abortion that women have to travel very far, have waiting periods, get illegal abortions, and otherwise risk their lives. Despite the ostensible justification for anti-abortion laws is to protect the “unborn”, the result is to increase the risk to fetuses, newborns, and their mothers. Dramatically.

There are also medical and healthcare factors that contribute to the maternal mortality rate in this country. As much as the social determinants of health, and anti-abortion anti-woman laws, contribute to the problem, medical care can make a difference. But too many women are not able to access good medical care for their pregnancies and births, in the prenatal and especially in the post-partum period. Among the important factors are the number and type of providers, geographic distribution of those providers, preference of providers for the kind of care that they want to do (or not do), and the ownership of practices and hospital by corporations that are interested mainly in money-making.

Let’s look at providers. Usually we think of obstetricians (OB-GYNs) as the people who deliver babies. And they do. Or at least many of them do. Actually, a minority, decreasing in % as they age. Doing gynecologic surgery is much more lucrative, and doesn’t require getting up at all hours to do deliveries. Plus, like most specialists, they are concentrated in urban (but not poor or inner-city) and suburban areas. So access to them is limited, especially geographically and financially. Certified Nurse-Midwives (CNMs) and family physicians also deliver babies, but often have the same “lifestyle” disincentives. Nurse-midwives are by definition about delivering (or “catching”) babies but usually are subservient to the dictates of the OB-GYN community. OBs probably do not mind if CNMs -- or family physicians -- deliver babies where the OBs do not want to be (rural and inner-city areas) but training programs may not have enough deliveries to allow them to learn. While nurse-midwives are a separate profession, their training may not strongly encourage them to assert themselves in practice.

And there is huge gap is in post-partum care. It is not uncommon for OBs (and, perhaps, others) to believe their job is done when the baby emerges, or at least when the woman is discharged. But as Dr. Frey’s piece points out, a very large number of maternal deaths take place in the post-partum period, up to 6 weeks after delivery, from bleeding, infection, and other causes that could be identified with the kind of close follow-up that too frequently does not occur. Not to mention identifying the risks for homicide (and suicide) in the situation in which the women lives.

Finally, but far from least important, is the structure of the medical care system. I have written extensively in previous blog posts about how hospitals and medical practices are run as businesses, to make money, rather than as facilities dedicated to improving the health of communities and the people in them. Birth, and the accompanying circumstances including maternal mortality, make a particular case. The businesses, as well as the physicians who work for them, are interested mainly in providing care when and where it is relatively easy and most profitable. This is understandable, but it is unacceptable. It is, at bottom, the cause of all the other problems. Receiving care for childbirth –including the prenatal and postpartum periods, as with all necessary medical services, should not be treated as luxury goods.

It may be OK that some people have a Lexus or Tesla, others a Toyota or Chevy, and still others an old clunker, while many have to walk or ride the bus. But it is not ok for healthcare, and specifically not childbirth. Women need to have access to excellent care no matter how much money they have or where they live.

That they do not is yet another indictment of a system built on profit rather than health.

More wealth, more health: what can we do to mitigate disparities?

The Washington Post’s “Wonkblog” reviewed a report by economists discussing “The stunning — and expanding — gap in life expectancy between the rich and the poor” (Max Ehrenfreund, Sept 18, 2015). One focus of the article, which is based on a report from the National Academy of Sciences, is that (in the words of the alternative title of the Wonkblog piece that displays in the URL), “the government is spending more to help rich seniors than poor ones”. A big reason for this is that the greater life expectancy of the more well-to-do means that they collect benefits from Social Security and Medicare for longer. But, of course, the real issue is that there is such a difference in the life expectancy of rich and poor. Ehrenfreund illustrates this with two dramatic graphs:

This is a pretty significant difference. What are the reasons for it? The report (and the article based on it) indicate that while differences in “lifestyle” (smoking and obesity, mainly) account for some of the difference, it is less than 1/3. The study also alludes to the impact of “stress”. This may seem vague, non-specific, or ubiquitous: aren’t we all stressed? Don’t rich people have a lot of stress because wealth is often accompanied by great responsibility? Such interpretations sometimes leads "stress" as a factor in longevity to be discounted by many commentators. But the impact of stress on health is a real thing, and it is well documented. Many people are familiar with the old terms “Type A” and “Type B” personalities, and how being Type A (more stressed) can lead to a greater risk of disease, particularly heart attack. But the real concern is a kind of stress that is more common in poorer people. This is the continuous stress, from worrying about whether you and your family will have enough food to eat and a place to live, whether you will have a job, whether it is safe to walk down the street, whether (especially if you are a young Black man) the police are going to stop you at any moment, that has major negative health effects. The mechanisms through which this occurs are incompletely elucidated, but certainly involve the neuroendocrine system, the release of hormones that prepare the body for “fight or flight” by refocusing blood flow to muscles, increasing heart rate, etc. Such a response is very useful in an emergency, but when it is happening most or all of the time, and the body does not have the time and rest to fully recuperate, it results in real health damage. This hormonal response allows a person to run fast, from an attacker or for sport, for a short time, but if the challenge never stops, the body eventually wears out

This sort of stress on the body may be the “final common pathway” through which many of the negative life situations that poorer people are more likely to find themselves in exact their toll, but there are also other factors. People’s health, and thus their life expectancy, is to a large extent determined by their early childhood experience. The relative income of their families of origin that affects their childhood nutrition and education, their warmth in the winter, and the amount of transmitted stress that their parents felt, is also a big determinant. While this disparity at the start of life is something that can be mitigated, by some, through future success, it can never be completely erased. That is, while rich people from poor backgrounds may have better health later in life than those who stay poorer, they have on average worse health than those who started out wealthy and stayed that way. “Choose your parents wisely,” I tell my medical students, “if they are both long-lived and rich, it bodes well for your future health.” Luckily for them, the majority of medical students come from at least upper-middle-income families.

Another big determinant is education, and many studies show the correlation of higher levels of education with longer life and better health. Of course, education is highly correlated with income, both on the front end (children from higher-income families are more likely to achieve higher educational levels) and on the back end (those children from families of lower socioeconomic status who are successful have usually become so through education). In the US, income is related to education in part because our schools are largely funded by local tax bases, so that wealthier people live in better funded, and educationally better, school districts. People from other countries often have difficulty understanding that we have “good” and “bad” school districts; as one friend said “where I come from all schools are the same! No one would choose where to live based on the quality of the schools!” This concept is so alien to me that I had difficulty understanding them!

In addition, education does not take place only in school. Children from upper-income families are more likely to have educated parents, who not only encourage them to pursue educational success, but read to them and talk to them from the very beginning of their lives. These are also families in which survival needs do not displace the priority of children getting an education. In 1943, the psychologist Abraham Maslow published his hierarchy of needs; survival must come before self-actualization. This was originally conceived of for the individual, but is also true of families and communities. A similar pyramid has been developed to describe the impact of Adverse Childhood Events (ACEs). ACEs are a ways of thinking about the combination of negative impacts including hunger, homelessness, physical abuse, sexual abuse, neighborhood dangerousness, etc., that have been shown to have a lifelong negative impact. In addition to being associated with higher future rates of drug abuse and mental illness, they are associated with higher rates of just about everything bad. The Adverse Childhood Experiences study conducted by Kaiser Permanente beginning in 1995-97 is the most significant study on this topic. It is ongoing and being replicated in many other countries.

 

Of course, lower income people are exposed to other risks beyond these. People living in “worse” neighborhoods have a greater likelihood of being homicide victims. Those neighborhoods are much more likely to be exposed to environmental pollutants in the air and water and even from the earth (such as toxic waste dumps). Many lower-income people work in more dangerous jobs, especially true in rural areas (farming, ranching, logging, highway construction, etc.) Indeed, the potential for “confounding” results from such exposures was the reason that Michael Marmot and his colleagues did their classic series of studies showing the direct correlation of higher socioeconomic status (class) and better health by examining people who worked for the government in the same offices in London (thus the name “the Whitehall studies”).

Wealthy people have a longer life expectancy than poor people, and wealthy countries have longer life expectancies than poorer countries, and those with wider gaps between the rich and poor have wider gaps in life expectancy; in this regard the US is at greater risk than wealthy nations with smaller gaps. The neat interactive website from Gapminder allows you to track wealth with life expectancy over time since 1800. The GINI index measures the income disparities within countries, and its use allows correlating income inequality with life expectancy; like several other health measures (e.g., infant mortality) life expectancy goes down with increasing inequality even when a country (such as the US) is rich overall.

So yes, our Social Security and Medicare systems mean that those who live longer will have more financial benefit, and that they are more likely to be more well-to-do than those who die younger. In addition, those who are poorer are more likely to live longer with disability. But the real news is that poverty and social deprivation work in many synergistic ways to decrease the health of the poor. This is what we need a coordinated and comprehensive strategy to address.

And the first step is recognizing and acknowledging it.