Good News Sundays — A Mother’s Day Edition

New mothers get the health care they need

Hey everyone and a happy Mother’s Day to the moms reading this. I hope someone is bringing you coffee, and you get to spend the day surrounded by the loved ones who you have poured yourselves into day after day.

For today’s Good News Sunday, I want to tell you about a quiet, five-year, state-by-state shift that has fundamentally changed health care for new mothers in this country for the better. And that almost nobody outside of policy circles has heard a word about.

After Wisconsin’s legislature passed it earlier this year, the United States now has 49 states plus the District of Columbia covering new mothers on Medicaid for a full year after they give birth. Just one state — Arkansas — still cuts that coverage off at 60 days.

Five years ago, that number was zero.

Here is what this means in plain English. Medicaid pays for about four in ten births in the United States. It is, by a wide margin, the largest single source of maternity care in this country. Until 2022, federal law only required states to cover those mothers for 60 days after they gave birth. Sixty days. After that, the coverage ended. Mom went home, the bill arrived, the insurance disappeared.

The trouble was simple. Recovery from childbirth doesn’t fit into 60 days. Healing takes longer far than that. So does screening for postpartum depression, adjusting medications, following up on any condition that pregnancy revealed or worsened, and getting to the appointments where a doctor catches the small things before they become big ones. The first year after a baby comes home is one of the most demanding stretches of a woman’s life. Moms deserve a doctor in it.

The fix was straightforward and sat in front of policymakers for years: extend Medicaid coverage from 60 days to 12 months. The American Rescue Plan Act of 2021 created the option for states to do exactly that. The Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2023 made the option permanent. And then, very quietly, a state-by-state rolling adoption began.

The full ideological spectrum of American state governments have signed on. Conservative Governor Abbott signed Texas’s extension in 2023, calling it “critical bipartisan legislation.” Florida and Massachusetts agree on this. Alabama and New Jersey agree on this. Wisconsin’s legislature finally agreed on it this winter after years of failed attempts.

There is something genuinely heartening about watching elected officials in fifty different state capitals — almost all of whom disagree about almost everything else — quietly arrive at the same conclusion: that mothers should not lose their doctor two months after they have a baby.

The early outcome data is also encouraging. A study of Texas mothers found that, after extension, women used roughly twice as many postpartum services — preventive care, contraception, mental and behavioral health treatment — and short-interval pregnancies dropped 37 percent. Research on Colorado’s earlier expansion found a meaningful increase in postpartum women receiving treatment for perinatal mood and anxiety disorders. Other studies have linked the extension to reductions in postpartum hospitalizations and emergency department visits. None of this is a maternal-health miracle on its own. It is the kind of basic, structural fix that should have been law decades ago.

There’s more work ahead, of course. American moms deserve better than they get on a lot of fronts. But this is the kind of practical, durable progress worth celebrating today — and hundreds of thousands of new mothers and babies every year are quietly better off because of it.

Again, happy Mother’s Day to every mom reading this. Take the day. Let someone else look after you this time.

And that, my friends, is good news for your Sunday.