Health Policy week 3

Title Your name Subject and Section Professor’s name Date 1 Details of the event * Name: "Dangerous Deliveries: The Spread of America's Maternity Care Deserts" (Health Matters Webinar) * Date: The webinar was posted on YouTube on February 1, 2024 * Sponsor: USC Center for Health Journalism, supported by the Commonwealth Fund and the National Institute for Healthcare Management (NIHCM) Foundation. * Length: 1:08:43 * Names of Participants and Their Titles: * Michelle Avander – Director, USC Center for Health Journalism (Moderator) * Netta Hassanein – Healthcare Reporter, Stateline (Nonprofit Newsroom), 2019 Center for Health Journalism National Fellow * Margot Snipe – National Health Reporter, Capital B News, 2022 National Fellow at the Center for Health Journalism * Link to the event: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vlSC3e2KbIQ 2 A summary of the event discussion The USC Center for Health Journalism's (2024) webinar looks further into the even more profound and worsening maternity care crisis in the United States, particularly in rural regions and women of color, detailing their experience in reporting on why some rural counties lack maternal care and why Black women suffer higher rates of maternal mortality and illness. The guests include Michelle Avander, with two guests, namely Netta Hassanein and Margot Snipe. The discussion includes significant health policies that have led to the problem. Georgia did this through the Certificate of Need (CON) Law, which hinders the ongoing establishment of new facilities in maternity care, hence limiting its access to areas most required. This webinar explains how these disparities have been addressed. For instance, the Georgia postpartum Medicaid expansion, the Improving Access to Maternity Care Act, and the Biden Rural Health Action Plan (Center for Health Journalism, 2024). Furthermore, the speakers also discuss the ways by which midwifery care and doulas should be used more, such that the panels together echo the call to fight racism embedded in the American healthcare systems and demand that oppressed and marginalized groups be allowed to receive adequate maternity care services (Center for Health Journalism, 2024). 3 Description of how this event relates to the current week’s topic. The webinar on maternity care deserts directly relates to Ndugga & Artiga's (2024) discussion of health disparities in their brief "Disparities in Health and Health Care: Finally, in section 5, Key Questions and Answers, the author provides a brief and to the point summary of the article. More notably, the webinar leaps and shows how black and rural women are subjected to unfair treatment in the provision of maternity care regardless of their race or geographical location. The authors emphasize that each time that health and healthcare disparities are identified, in general, they speak of system issues, and this is evident in the webinar regarding how matters related to the closure of hospitals or matters concerning maternity care deserts affect women of color. These challenges resonate with disparity. Ndugga & Artiga (2024) discuss more care access and maternal health. The challenges highlighted in the webinar reflect the brief where the central theme was the inequality of the health system. The brief also describes federal actions like Medicaid expansion and policy reforms that reduce these gaps in care, which are also part of the discussion in the webinar. This alignment underscores the need for structural reforms to eliminate health inequa...