[ad_1]
Dane County plans to stop making unmarried fathers pay back the state Medicaid program for birth costs of their children in cases before 2020, a step the county took that year with new cases.
The CDC has just released a new report on the infant mortality rate in the US and the news is grim. According to their findings, that number has actually gone up for the first time in twenty years, revealing a concerning trend. Veuer’s Tony Spit has the details.
Milwaukee County said last month it will end new birth cost recovery actions, another move to curtail a practice opponents say contributes to poor birth outcomes by requiring pregnant women to disclose the fathers of their children or lose Medicaid coverage after the babies are born.
“She’s the one forced to make a difficult choice about the relationship and the consequences,” said Brynne McBride, a public interest attorney at ABC for Health, a Madison-based nonprofit law firm that helps people obtain health care.
People are also reading…
Stress caused by birth cost recovery, which particularly impacts Black and Native American families, can lead to preterm birth and infant death, problems that disproportionately affect such communities, McBride said.
Wisconsin is believed to be among eight or fewer states that try to recoup some of the pregnancy and birth expenses covered by Medicaid from fathers who are not married to the mothers. Proponents say the practice helps keep Medicaid solvent and promotes paternal responsibility.
County child support agencies collect the money through court orders. Unlike child support payments, the birth cost money doesn’t directly help the child, McBride said. Counties keep 15% of it and return the rest to Medicaid.
About half of Wisconsin’s nearly 60,000 annual births are covered by Medicaid, with 66% of the Medicaid deliveries in 2020 occurring among unmarried people, ABC for Health said in a report last year. Among Black deliveries, 88% were unmarried and subject to birth cost recovery. Among Native Americans, it was 85%.
As of last year, Wisconsin counties were collecting on $106 million in birth cost judgments in more than 78,000 cases, ABC for Health said. Milwaukee County had $69.2 million and Dane County had $6.8 million.
In 2018, the state told counties to stop birth cost recovery if the unmarried father was part of “intact family,” living with the mother and supporting the child.
In the 2020 Dane County budget, County Executive Joe Parisi said he was “ending the controversial practice” of birth cost recovery, noting its “stark” racial disparities. “We can forgo this revenue and give these parents one less expense while many of them struggle to make ends meet,” Parisi said in his budget summary.
However, the county continued to collect on judgments from before 2020. In fact, the collections increased to $2.2 million in 2020 from less than $1.2 million in 2019, as the county intercepted COVID-19 pandemic stimulus checks and unemployment bonuses, ABC for Health reported last year.
The 2024 county budget, passed last month, said the county will ask the state to “release” prior birth cost recovery judgments so it can stop collecting on them. Of about 4,000 old judgments, the county can expunge about 3,000, the county said. The other 1,000 or so involve people who haven’t used state benefits or applied for county services, said Vue Yang, legal director of the county’s child support agency.
The budget includes funding for child support workers to work on eliminating the birth cost recovery debt, plus $41,000 to be awarded to an organization to educate affected families about the change.
Milwaukee County’s 2024 budget, also passed last month, said the county will end birth cost recovery, resulting in a $200,000 reduction in revenue. The policy applies to new cases, but the county plans to work with courts to reduce prior case debt amounts, said Sup. Caroline Gómez-Tom, who pushed for the change.
ABC for Health, which has long advocated for ending birth cost recovery, is pleased by the new policies in Dane and Milwaukee counties and vows to make sure they are promptly implemented, McBride said.
The nonprofit would like Wisconsin to end the practice statewide — a move Democratic Gov. Tony Evers included in his proposed budget in 2019 but the Republican-controlled Legislature removed.
Absent state action, McBride said the group plans to focus on other counties with the most birth cost recovery debt: Racine, Kenosha, Brown, Waukesha and Outagamie.
In Dane County, fathers were more likely to pay child support, and those payments increased, after the county stopped new birth cost recovery cases in 2020, according to a study this year by UW-Madison researchers. The study, by the university’s Institute for Research on Poverty, compared unmarried Medicaid deliveries in the county in 2020-2021 with those outside of the county in 2016-2021 and in the county before 2020.
While fathers of Black children were more likely to pay child support and an increased amount of support after birth cost recovery ended, fathers of white children were less likely to pay child support and the amount declined, the study found. “Overall, our findings suggest that birth cost recovery cessation may have narrowed racial inequities in child support outcomes, albeit in part due to declines in child support payments among white fathers,” the researchers wrote.
[ad_2]
Source link
