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.

"Non-profit" hospital systems behaving worse than for-profits: No end to the scams

I have often written about the greed of hospitals and “health systems”. In a competitive environment (especially in big metropolitan areas) they have combined and consolidated and become enormously powerful. This has been good for them, as they have made a lot of money. Now these large health systems and the insurance companies stand almost as warriors in the gladiatorial arena, each believing that the other is the problem; the hospitals complain that the insurers don’t pay enough and the insurance companies complain that the hospitals charge too much. Nowhere in this equation is the “consumer”, the “patient”, the “person” who is supposed to be the focus of this whole system. If the hospitals and insurers are the gladiators, people are the ants crushed under foot.

“For-profit” healthcare organizations -- incorporated tax-paying, investor-owned -- that run hospitals, nursing homes, and virtually any other kind of healthcare related operation (obviously including all pharmaceutical companies) have long been callously evil in their pursuit of profit, although they have never claimed they were not. Many university teaching hospitals, and even publicly-owned hospitals, were taken over by such companies when their former owners could not afford them (didn’t want to support with tax money, in the case of public hospitals, and were losing money from a combination of caring for people without insurance and overspending on administrators in the case of university hospitals). Predictably, this led to no improvement in the quantity or quality of care being delivered – the quantity, especially for the poor was always less. But it did bail out the former owners.

What has become more and more apparent over the years and decades is that “non-profit” hospitals (called “voluntary” in  New York) have become just as callous and evil, including those associated with religious orders that founded them on the basis of serving the ill and those in need. These hospital systems do not have owners or shareholders and are free from paying taxes, in acknowledgement of the community service that they – ostensibly -- provide. The problem is that they continue to receive the tax break, while cutting back and back on the community service, until in many cases it is not only negligible but even negative – actively hurting the community.

In recent days, the New York Times has featured an exposé on this situation, focusing on two systems, Providence (based in Washington state) and Bon Secours (in Virginia). Both have ravaged and ripped off the people who should be receiving their care, acting in at least as predatory a manner as any for-profit, while legally (so far, maybe) gaming the systems put in place by state and federal governments to regulate them and ensure that they deliver community service.

The article on the Providence system, one of the largest in the nation with 51 hospitals, originally founded by a caring order of nuns, is called 'They Were Entitled to Free Care. Hospitals Hounded Them to Pay.’ It is enough to make you throw up if you are at all a caring person, or one who might ever need healthcare. The gist of the piece is that their prior level of “community service”, the justification for paying no tax, was providing 1.29% “charity care” (well below the already-pitiful national average of 2%), and that this was slashed to below 1% by a new campaign by management to wring every nickel out of every patient, especially those with no or terrible insurance and no money. The article details the methods utilized (such as never offering people, regardless of poverty, the option of not paying, but only how they would pay). These details are sufficient to ensure that, if the perpetrators are religious, they know where they are headed after this life. Even the people who ended up not paying (essentially because they had no money) were subjected to terrible oppression and dunning not only by the hospital itself but by the collection agencies they hired, including garnishing wages from those who were lucky enough to even have jobs. The federal government does not prescribe a specific percent of charitable care that must be done to stay tax-free, but squeezing the poorest is clearly not the intention.

Providence avoids more than $1 billion a year in taxes. In exchange, the Internal Revenue Service requires them to provide services, such as free care for the poor, that benefit the communities in which they operate.

They’re not doing much of that! Meanwhile,

Providence is one of the largest nonprofit health systems in the country, with 51 hospitals and more than 900 clinics. Its revenue last year exceeded $27 billion.

Providence is sitting on $10 billion that it invests, Wall Street-style, alongside top private equity firms. It even runs its own venture capital fund.

What they are doing contravenes any conception of why a hospital (or system) should be tax-free; indeed, it makes the for-profits look good, because while they act no better, at least they pay taxes!

The next day’s article, about Bon Secours Mercy Health, ‘How a Hospital Chain Used a Poor Neighborhood to Turn Huge Profits’, describes

‘Richmond Community Hospital … consists of little more than a strapped emergency room and a psychiatric ward. It does not have kidney or lung specialists, or a maternity ward,’

and how it is the most profitable hospital in Virginia, making over $100M a year profit.  The scam here is just as reprehensible as Providence’s, but is a little more difficult to understand. It involves gaming  a federal program called 340B. This program was developed to allow people who were poor but not on Medicaid to get reduced costs for their drugs. This is a good thing, but this example also shows how evil corporations can misuse even well-intended programs.

Here’s basically how it works: an eligible entity buys outpatient drugs from pharmaceutical companies and then gets a rebate from them, which can be tens of millions of dollars. The federal government likes this because, unlike money for Medicaid drugs, it doesn’t come out of their coffers but from the drug companies (and thus, of course, the drug companies hate it). What is an eligible entity? Some are categorical, like Federally-Qualified Health Centers (FQHCs). Hospitals become eligible if more than a designated percent of their inpatients are on Medicaid. This is ironic on two counts, since Medicaid patients are not eligible for 340B drugs (because their drugs are already purchased at a discounted rate, and must be separated from 340B drugs) and the drugs are not for use on inpatients. The qualification is an on/off threshold;  you either qualify with a certain % of Medicaid inpatient days or you don’t. Once you do qualify, any outpatient medications you dispense are eligible for rebates; there is no income restriction on who you can sell these drugs to.

 

Maybe you see where this is going. Bon Secours Mercy qualifies for 340B at Richmond Community Hospital since it is an inner-city hospital serving almost entirely poor people. And the outpatient pharmacy there would surely be entitled to use 340B drugs, and that would be the intent of the program. But…here’s the genius: Bon Secours set up a network of clinics in high-income communities that were legally tied to the “mother” hospital of Richmond, and thus received its 340B designation. So now they could sell drugs on which they got huge rebates to people with money and insurance! Cool! Great idea if you are an MBA student! You might get a good mark for coming up with such a project, provided you can demonstrate that it was not illegal and the management won’t go to jail or pay a huge fine. In this case, I hope that they do. What is wrong with it? Well, for starters they’re not investing any of that money back into Richmond Community, the source of their 340B designation, the hospital that is miserably inadequate to care for its patients…

Of course, not all hospitals and hospital systems are Bon Secours or Providence. Some, especially in small towns and rural areas, and inner cities, are barely surviving. Of course: the rich get richer, even on the backs of the poor, as in the Richmond case. But the ones that are successful (i.e., making money) are almost all doing similar things, gaming the system, and providing as little charitable care as possible, while paying no tax and, if they can, maximizing income from programs such as 340B.

There is a solution. A national health insurance system, Improved and Enhanced Medicare for All, in which everyone’s medical bills are paid by the federal government and hospital budgets are negotiated annually, and there is little or no opportunity for such scams.

Emergency services, COVID, and the health system: Your life could well be at risk

I recently had a very unpleasant health event, involving severe abdominal pain for most of a day and night, and many days of recovery. The details of my specific condition are not particularly important, other than to say it is a chronic, recurrent problem, resulting from an event decades ago; it could well need emergency surgery and can have serious results. The point is that I had to decide whether to go to the emergency room that night, and to discuss the issues, both personal and structural, that impacted that decision, and what it demonstrates about our healthcare system, made even worse by the stress of COVID.

Considerations on the side of “go to the ER” were 1) I was in a lot of pain that was lasting longer than it generally has (say twice a year), and wanted to not be, 2) I knew pretty well what was causing it and that, while it had happened before and usually resolved, it could also NOT get better and maybe require emergency surgery, or worse. Considerations on the side of “don’t go to the ER” were 1) it has usually in the past resolved, eventually, on its own, and 2) the idea of getting in the car to go to the ER, and then waiting to be triaged and seen, and maybe imaged, which was likely to take many hours, all while in such pain, was a very negative incentive. If I was going to be writhing in untreated severe pain, I would prefer it to be in my own bed than in the waiting room of an ER. Plus, COVID. Both because it has made the crowding and wait times in ERs and hospitals much worse than “normal”, and because being there increases the risk of exposure and infection. I happen to live in what is currently a “high COVID” state, but nowhere is a really “low COVID risk” area. As it turns out, I didn’t go, and by morning, after about 18 hours, the worst was past. This time. But it will happen again and I will again have to decide what to do.

As do many, many thousands of others, every day, in the US. For many people, a major concern is cost – because visits to the ER are costly for those with no or poor insurance (really a lot of people). Fortunately for me, I’m not in that group. For others, it is because of fear of finding out what the problem is, and that it will be something really bad that they don’t want to know about. That also wasn’t really my issue; as a physician who has dealt with this, I knew what the problem was. Unfortunately, that can make it worse, since my fears and realization of the possible outcomes are based in evidence and not just fear. For yet others, it is the expectation that because of who they are (not White, poor, poorly insured, not well-dressed, have a history of alcohol or drug use or mental illness, or something else that doctors tend to associate with making one of less value) that they will be pushed back in the line, not believed, have their stories discounted, and generally be treated badly. Not really me either, although my physician privilege is decreased now that I am retired in another city, and do not get to go to the ER in the hospital where I work every day and people know me. For a lot of people, it is a combination of these, synergistically making their experience, and expectation of that experience, worse.

In case there may be anyone who is skeptical about my saying it is likely to be hours of waiting even when one presents with an emergency condition and is obviously educated and “respectable” (as a physician or nurse), it happens, and is happening much more continuously in the Age of COVID, when facilities are completely stretched to their limit and resources and people who work there are stressed to the max. Just recently, the last few months, two people who are close to me and are healthcare professionals have been through this experience. One had acute appendicitis, and needed emergency surgery, and after waiting many hours at home before venturing to the ER, waited there for 7 more hours before being seen. Luckily, they are now OK. It was not a positive experience! The other had a similar serious need, a ruptured diverticulitis causing peritonitis. She also waited in excruciating pain for hours, despite the fact that she was accompanied by her husband, a physician from the community who has practiced here for decades who was reduced to screaming at staff before she got her necessary emergency surgery. (For the record, these two people and I are all “seniors”, but these scenarios can and do affect everyone; my initial crisis was when I was 40 years old.)

The best advice anyone can give me is “get an ambulance”; they’ll see you sooner than if you arrive by car. This may well be true, and it may be good advice for me or for any other individual who is not worried about an additional $2000 bill, but in no way addresses the systemic problems that obviously exist.

The first of these is the incredible stress put on the system and the individuals working in it, doctors, nurses, and other healthcare workers, by the COVID pandemic. The burden on hospitals and healthcare workers has been phenomenal. In this sense, doctors and nurses and others on the front line are our heroes, as they are often portrayed. Yes, sometimes they can exhibit inappropriate behaviors. These can even be exhibited by folks in whom they rarely manifested before as a result of the continuous stress of working in the situation that they, and we as patients and as a society, find ourselves in. The governmental response to the pandemic, led by a federal administration who acted as if their intention was to do everything completely wrong, was shockingly inadequate. Yes, building new hospital capacity is possible and usually slow, but some localities did it, and yes, training and equipping more healthcare workers takes time. But there is no conceivable justifiable excuse for not having sufficient PPE, for example, months into the pandemic. This could only happen because of the worst possible management. Remember that this is the country that put a person on the moon 8 years after the first suborbital flight, that built the interstate highway system, that could assemble battleships in weeks during WW II, that has enough money to give trillions of $$ in tax cuts to billionaires and corporations. It only did not happen because of more than ineptitude; it happened because of an intent to do evil. We can hope that at least much of this can be reversed by a Biden administration.

The other big structural issue is our terribly designed and implemented healthcare nonsystem that discriminates against people based upon wealth and insurance status, race and ethnicity, age and pre-exisiting conditions, geographical location, and in appropriate allocation of resources that in the best of (non-COVID) circumstances sends a hugely disproportionate number of true emergencies (medical, surgical, trauma) to some hospitals while others have relatively low, and more mild, usage of their emergency facilities. It is also the fact that many people cannot get into see their primary care physicians promptly, or do not even have primary care physicians (or other providers, such as NPs) so end up waiting until they are severely ill and going to the ER. These are people who, if they get hospitalized, can be considered “primary care preventable” hospitalizations. That is, if they had been able to easily and promptly see a primary care doctor for their illness, and at least as important, had their chronic diseases effectively managed and controlled, would have not needed hospitalization – or emergency care. This needs another set of structural solutions. It needs, first off, a universal national health insurance system. Every single person in the country needs to be completely covered for every medical necessity, without copays, deductibles, etc., and we all need to be in the same program.  The pandemic has clearly demonstrated the vulnerability of employer-based coverage. It is long past time, if it ever was, for ideas of gradual piecemeal expansion of Medicare, ACA, Medicaid, etc. If everyone is not in the same system, it is not a possibility but rahter a certainty that some will get better care than others. Separate, the Supreme Court ruled in 1954, is not equal in education, and separate insurance systems cannot create equality in healthcare.

A universal health insurance system, such as Medicare for All, is not going to fix all of the things that I discussed above. We need to ensure that there are hospitals and ERs available to all people. We need to ensure that all hospitals are welcoming to all patients, and that there is a rational system of referral from smaller to larger hospitals.  We must ensure that there is adequate primary care capacity so that everyone can have a provider that they can see regularly, and promptly when needed, and do not need to access ERs for either primary care or for urgent conditions that could have been prevented by good primary care. And we need to make sure that there is adequate emergency capacity for all emergencies to be cared for emergently, and that ERs, and hospitals, and health systems, are designed and funded and run based solely on what best needs the health needs of the entire community, and not on what makes the most profit for the owners. A universal health insurance system is necessary but not sufficient.

We need all that, and need it yesterday.

Ron Dellums: Loss of a great leader and a job for the rest of us

On July 30, 2018, Ron Dellums, one of the giants of our era, died of cancer. As the obituaries in the New York Times and Washington Post make clear, he was a major progressive voice, inside and out of Congress, for many years. He was elected, largely on an anti-Vietnam war platform, in 1971 from “one of the most liberal districts” in the nation, Oakland and Berkeley, CA, and served until 1998. Over the decades he fought for women’s rights, civil rights, civil liberties, inclusion, anti-corporatism, fairness and equity, labor, and environmental goals. ‘He championed a progressive mantra: Stop war. Cut military spending. Help people. Address the nation’s social problems.’ He was a founder of the Congressional Black Caucus, and in 2007 was elected to a term as Mayor of the city of Oakland.

‘“So here comes this black guy from the Bay Area,” he told The Progressive magazine when he left Congress, “talking about peace, feminism, challenging racism, challenging the priorities of the country, and talking about preserving the fragile nature of our ecological system. People looked at me as if I was a freak. And looking back, I think that the only crime we committed was that we were 20 years ahead of our time.”

But, quite amazingly, neither the Times nor the Post obituaries, nor his extensive updated Wikipedia entry mention the issue that is the one that first comes to mind for progressives in the health care arena: his early and continuing support for a national health system, which he agreed was the most logical, effective, and cost-effective means of providing for the health care needs of the American people. The “Dellums Bill”, which was first introduced in 1972 and re-introduced at every session in which he served in Congress, would have created a national health system (not just a national health insurance plan) and was far more expansive than simply Medicare for All, although Mr. Dellums also supported that, and its current iteration, HR 676. Dellums’ United States Health Service Act actually proposed a comprehensive and rational health care system, with neighborhood health centers, larger multispecialty centers, local hospitals, regional hospitals, and referral centers, all joined to each other, all run by elected boards of consumers, and all funded by public funds. It would have been – and still would be – terrific for the health of the American people, and for controlling costs, to have such a system in place. Of course, it would not have been nearly as profitable for providers (which mainly means hospitals, but also doctors and others), insurance companies, pharmaceutical companies, device manufacturers, and other profiteers. So, of course, it never occurred. But Congressman Dellums continued to be a beacon for universal health care, and we should be ever thankful for his leadership in this arena.

Ron Dellums championed universal health care before Bernie Sanders was the spokesperson for it, although both supported each other, and remained a staunch advocate for it. Today we are still far from this goal, although the ACA did significantly expand access. Although its opponents have not succeeded in repealing it, they have done what they could to make it less effective in covering everyone, including removing the individual mandate, removing funding for many of its programs (such as navigators), limiting access to the individual marketplace (although as many people signed up in 2017-18 with only six weeks to do it as in 2016-17 with 12 weeks, attesting to its popularity), and other reactionary efforts. But the ACA was not universal health care, nor was it an effective way of controlling costs. It expanded coverage, but did not redesign the health system the way the Dellums Bill would have.

With control of the government in the hands of Republicans, including not only the self-designated populist and reality TV figure who is President, but a Congress and state governments in the hands of a GOP who manifest no semblance of humanity. As noted accurately by Thomas Frank in The Guardian

‘Republicans are a known quantity. Their motives are simple: they will do anything, say anything, profess faith in anything to get tax cuts, deregulation and a little help keeping workers in line. Nothing else is sacred to them. Rules, norms, traditions, deficits, the Bible, the constitution, whatever. They don’t care, and in this they have proven utterly predictable.’

Certainly they don’t care about the American people’s health, which is suffering worst in the reddest counties in the US, those that have also suffered the worst from stagnant wages coming from the pro-corporate policies of the GOP, as well as environmental degradation. We need to continue to work to change these policies, to un-elect Republicans, to elect people who stand for progressive change and not pro-Wall St status quo like the DNC.

While we will not be able to re-create him, we need more people who seek to be like Ron Dellums.

Stop war. Cut military spending. Help people. Address the nation’s social problems.