A new USA Today study identifies the United States as now being the "most dangerous place to give birth in the developed world."
"Experts say that about 50 percent of the deaths of women from childbirth-related causes could be prevented if they were given better medical care and that's a really surprising thing given that we're one of the wealthiest countries in the world and we spend so much on medical care. We're not just talking about the women who die, we're talking about 50,000 U.S. women who are suffering life-altering harms," USA Today investigative reporter Alison Young told "CBS This Morning" on Thursday.
USA Today pins much of the problem on indifference by regulators, including a "lack of action by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services." It also notes that it doesn't have to be this way: The Democratic stronghold of California has dramatically reduced deaths in childbirth even as those in much of the rest of the nation were rising. The most dangerous states for American women: Louisiana, Georgia, and Vice President Mike Pence's home state of Indiana. Arkansas, New Jersey, Missouri and Texas are next.
Among the biggest dangers to women in childbirth is high blood pressure, which must be treated "expeditiously" during labor, according to the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, and extreme blood loss. In practice, most American hospitals are not following recommendations, and experts USA Today spoke with repeatedly noted that there has long been an institutional tendency to claim dangerous incidents were a result of poor maternal health. As the California results show, that's not true.
The experts also noted one other difference between the American healthcare system and that of other nations: Those other nations have nationalized health care, greatly simplifying the roll out of discovered reforms.
We don't:
Martin and other experts said that’s one reason why women giving birth in Great Britain die from childbirth complications at one-third of the rate they do here.
Without a centralized system, reform will require multiple entities to insist on change: hospital administrators, insurance companies and others that pay for childbirth, and malpractice insurers who defend practitioners against lawsuits, Martin said. [...]
“We’ve put a lot of credence in the idea of voluntary improvement and it’s just not enough,” Haskell said. “You have to have transparency and you have to have regulation.”
In the absence of that centralization, however, efforts will remain alarmingly ... voluntary. And that means for now, the major reform effort by experts is to encourage other states to adopt the now-proven California reforms. Foremost among them: monitoring for dangerous conditions like escalating blood pressure with greater regularity, allowing speedier treatment when those dangers are spotted.