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Murray Secures Inclusion of Maternal Health Bills In Omnibus

Murray: “After a pandemic that has pushed our nation’s unconscionable maternal mortality crisis in the wrong direction—these bipartisan bills represent much needed progress to help save lives and keep mothers healthy after birth.”

 

Washington, D.C. – Today, Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions (HELP) Committee Chair, Senator Patty Murray (D-WA), released the following statement on the inclusion of two bills to address the nation’s maternal mortality crisis as part of the omnibus.

 

“After a pandemic that has pushed our nation’s unconscionable maternal mortality crisis in the wrong direction—these bipartisan bills represent much needed progress to help save lives and keep mothers healthy after birth. I’m glad we were able to find common ground on steps to improve maternal health data collection, build our maternal health care workforce, increase access to care in rural areas, address discrimination that undermines care for patients of color, implement evidence-based best practices, and more.

 

“But even after we get these bills signed into law, we will have plenty of work ahead. The fact that our maternal death rate is the highest in the developed world—and higher still among women of color—isn’t just a tragedy, it’s an outrage. I’m going to keep fighting to change that and ensure every expecting parent can get the quality health care they need to have a healthy pregnancy.”

 

The omnibus released today includes both the Maternal Health Quality Improvement Act and the Rural Maternal and Obstetric Modernization of Services (Rural MOMS) Act, bills which passed out of the Senate HELP Committee last year. These foundational bills authorize and improve programs to address the maternal mortality crisis in this country and build on current funding at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA) to reduce maternal morbidity and mortality.

 

The progress on the two bills comes as new data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention shows the U.S. maternal mortality rate rose again in 2020—particularly among women of color. Even before the latest increase, the U.S. had the highest maternal mortality rate in the developed world, and those high rates have been felt most acutely by Black and Indigenous women. Rural communities, where patients are more likely to struggle to find maternal health care, also face particularly high maternal death rates. An estimated sixty percent of these maternal deaths are preventable.


The omnibus also includes $177 million, an increase of $109 million above fiscal year 2021, in HRSA, CDC and NIH for work aimed at improving maternal health and reducing the nation’s alarmingly high maternal mortality rate. This will fund stronger data systems to improve surveillance and help expand programs that are proven to be successful at reducing maternal mortality. This includes: $83 million, an increase of $20 million above fiscal year 2021, for CDC to expand support for Safe Motherhood/Infant Health; $30 million, an increase of $6 million, for State Maternal Health Innovation Grants to expand grants for maternal care services, workforce needs, and postpartum and inter-conception care services; and $30 million for NIH’s new Implementing a Maternal Health and Pregnancy Outcomes Vision for Everyone (IMPROVE) initiative to expand research to reduce preventable causes of maternal death and improve the health of pregnant and postpartum women.

 

About the Maternal Health Quality Improvement Act and the Rural MOMS Act

 

The Maternal Health Quality Improvement Act works to:

 

  • Provide patients with better care by authorizing a grant program for innovations in reducing maternal mortality, including developing evidence-based best practices and improving maternal mortality review committee data;
  • Improve health equity by authorizing a grant program to train health care providers on issues that can undermine health care for communities of color—including the need to identify and eliminate racial and ethnic biases;
  • Reduce and prevent discrimination by requiring a study on best practices for teaching within health professional training programs; and
  • Support innovative health care approaches by authorizing a grant program for developing integrated health care services for pregnant and postpartum women and infants, with grants and reporting of study outcomes.

 

The Rural MOMS Act works to:

 

  • Improve rural maternal and obstetric care data critical to understanding and addressing the maternal death crisis by directing the CDC to coordinate efforts with respect to maternal mortality and morbidity, report on women’s health conditions according to sociocultural and geographic contexts, and emphasize research on pregnancy-related deaths;
  • Lower maternal mortality and morbidity and improve birth outcomes by awarding new rural obstetric network grants to establish regional innovation networks;
  • Make it easier for patients to get maternal health care by expanding existing federal telehealth grant programs to include birth and postpartum services as part of telehealth networks and to allow federal funding to be used for ultrasound machines, fetal monitoring equipment, and other pregnancy-related technology;
  • Increase the maternal health workforce by establishing a new rural maternal and obstetric care training demonstration to support training for family medicine physicians, obstetricians, nurse practitioners, physician assistants, midwives, doulas, and other professionals to provide maternal care services in rural community-based settings; and
  • Require reporting on maternal care in rural areas to identify the locations of gaps in maternity care, disparities in maternal health in rural areas by race and ethnicity, recommendations to standardize data collection on maternal mortality and morbidity, and activities to improve maternal care in rural areas.

 

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