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(Original headline: State will pay alien prenatal services .... Medicaid change to begin on July 1)
April 25, 2004
BY NELL SMITH ARKANSAS DEMOCRAT-GAZETTE
The state Medicaid program will soon begin paying for immigrant women's prenatal care, allowing an expected 800 to 1,000 women annually in Arkansas to get health insurance coverage for their pregnancies.
The state will allow payment for this prenatal care by changing the definition of a Medicaid-eligible child.
Starting July 1, a person will qualify for Medicaid at conception. Medicaid - the government health insurance program for the poor - will cover medical services for the fetus, which presumably will be an
American citizen at birth.
Advocates for immigrants praised the effort's new access to prenatal care for illegal and some legal immigrants. They say paying for relatively inexpensive prenatal car
e c
n head off potentially very expensi
ve problems.
It costs about $1,800 for a baby to spend a day in intensive care, compared with the $1,300 it would cost Medicaid to pay for a woman's prenatal care, delivery and postpartum care, said Roy Jeffus, director of the state's Medicaid program.
"It just makes good sense," said Bob Trevino, the state director of the League of United Latin American Citizens, an organization focused on the advancement of Hispanics. "In our view, women who don't get proper prenatal care are at large risk. And I think Hispanics are probably one of the largest prenatal birth defect risk categories."
While expanding benefits for mothers-to-be, the change has some people calling the move "anti-woman."
Th
e change worries some abortion-rights advocates who consider the move a politically motivated attempt to elevate the status of a fetus and infringe on a woman's right to end her pregnancy.<b
r><b
r>Un
der the Med
icaid plan, "the egg would have different rights than the woman carrying it
," said Wanda Stephens, president of the Arkansas chapter of the National Organization for Women, in an emailed statement. "This is another underhanded antiwoman attempt to make an egg a person."
The Medicaid change is the result of an option offered in 2002 that allows states to cover immigrant women's prenatal care using Arkansas' State Children's Health Insurance Program.
Only six other states - Illinois, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Rhode Island and Washington - have opted to use this option to provide prenatal care services, said Donna Cohen Ross, outreach director for the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a Washington-based organization that works on federal
and state fiscal policies. The center conducts an annual survey of all Medicaid programs in every state.
Until the change goes into effect, many immigrants don't qualify fo
r Medica
id for p
renatal care or an
y other medical service. Arkansas Medicaid is not offered to illegal immigrants or legal immigrants wh
o have been in the country less than five years.
Many of these women when pregnant go to local health department units, which provide prenatal care primarily for uninsured women and those who qualify for Medicaid. Roughly half of the estimated 2,000 foreign-born Hispanic women who give birth in Arkansas annually get prenatal care at the state Health Department, said d*ck Nugent, the group leader of the department's Family Health Group.
Because of budget constraints and a growing number of uninsured - including many immigrants - some county health units have had a difficult time providing prenatal care for all the women who need it. The problem has been particularly pronounce
d in Washington County, where local hospitals have donated ultrasound services and money to help the Health Department continue to provide prenatal care services. In 2000,
Arkansas ha
d 73,690 for
eign-born residents, inclu
ding 40,741 who came between 1990 and March 2000, the U.S. Census Bureau reported. Among the fo
reignborn, 51,635, or 1.9 percent of the population, were not citizens.
Arkansas had 86,866 residents who considered themselves Hispanic or "latino." Benton County had 13,469 Hispanics; Washington County 12,932; Pulaski County 8,816; and Sebastian County 7,710.
Among cities, Springdale had 9,005 Hispanics; Rogers, 7,490; Fort Smith 7,048; Little Rock 4,889; and Fayetteville, 2,821.
Now that some of the Health Department's clients will qualify for new reimbursement, some advocates hope more women will be able to get prenatal care from local health units - or even private physicians.
"That would be a dramatic shift in how prenatal care is taken care o
f," said Kathy Grisham, director of the Community Clinic at St. Francis House in Springdale.
Community Clinic cares for indigent patients but does
not provide pren
atal care. Grish
am has worked on a local task forc
e focused on financial aid for prenatal care. The Health Department's Nugent is less optimistic that Medicaid coverage f
or prenatal care will substantially change the department 's capacity to provide maternity services.
"It will help," he said, "but it will not be an overwhelming amount of assistance."
The Health Department recently reduced its 2005 budget by $5.3 million, citing reimbursement problems in three service areas, including prenatal care.
If 1,000 women - the maximum expected - take advantage of the Medicaid coverage, the new benefit could cost the state's Medicaid program $1.3 million.
Still, Trevino, the League of United Latin American Citizens advocate, said he believes the program is a good fit for
Arkansas. (He also serves as an economic development policy adviser to Gov. Mike Huckabee.)
"In Arkansas we felt like if we run the numb
ers, the population
is still small enoug
h that it wouldn't break the state, b
reak the bank, if you will, in terms of Medicaid to cover the expectant mother and her child."
The money will come from the state's ARKids B program, which re
ceives up to about $34,154,500 annually from the federal government. In this program, the federal government pays about $4 for every $1 Arkansas spends on medical care. Still some people who support tighter immigration enforcement are uncomfortable with the idea of using government funds to provide services for people who are not U.S. citizens.
"Immigrants should not be a public charge on the American public," said Jack Martin, special projects director for the Federation for American Immigration Reform in Washington, "and we, therefore, think that it is reasonable for the
public to resist efforts to extend taxpayer-supported benefits to either illegal immigrants or to legal immigrants" until they become
American citizens.
Martin said pregnant
immigrant women should be deported, instead of
given benefits to accommodate their pregnancies.
Mark Krikorian, executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies, an independent, nonprofit research organization in Washingto
n, supports immigration control, but he said he believes withholding government benefits is the wrong approach. Politically, he said, prenatal care is a particularly difficult benefit to deny immigrants. "Prenatal care is one of the toughest issues there is with government services for immigrants," he said. "Even throwing little kids out of school seems to me less of a problem than this issue of prenatal care."
Added to that incendiary political issue, the change to Medicaid stirs emotion on both sides of the abortion debate.
The Medicaid change has a charac
teristic in common with the recent federal legislation that makes it a separate crime to harm a fetus during an assault on the
mother. Both recognize a f
etus as a person entitled to
certain benefits.
"We support that because
we believe that life begins at conception," said Rose Mimms, executive director of Arkansas Right to Life, an advocacy group opposed to abortion. "So it seems very reasonable to us to want to protect that chi
ld from the very moment of its life at conception through its prenatal life to birth."
But abortion-rights advocates say the new Medicaid benefit puts them in an uncomfortable position of opposing a provision that would help immigrant women.
"It's Catch 22," said Marvin Schwartz, vice president of community affairs for Planned Parenthood of Arkansas and Eastern Oklahoma.
It's a "fairly complex and very clever approach, a two-pronged approach," he said. "On one level giving a medical service provision
[and] at the same time weakening the strengths of the pro-abortion community."
<a href='http://cochise
observer.tripod.com/NEWS/AR_Pre
natalCareFleec040425.html' targ
et='_blank'>http://cochiseobserver.tripod.com/NEWS/AR_...lee
c040425.html</a>
(Original headline: State will pay alien prenatal services .... Medicaid change to begin on July 1)
April 25, 2004
BY NELL SMITH ARKANSAS DEMOCRAT-GAZETTE
The state Medicaid program will soon begin paying for immigrant women's prenatal care, allowing an expected 800 to 1,000 women annually in Arkansas to get health insurance coverage for their pregnancies.
The state will allow payment for this prenatal care by changing the definition of a Medicaid-eligible child.
Starting July 1, a person will qualify for Medicaid at conception. Medicaid - the government health insurance program for the poor - will cover medical services for the fetus, which presumably will be an
American citizen at birth.
Advocates for immigrants praised the effort's new access to prenatal care for illegal and some legal immigrants. They say paying for relatively inexpensive prenatal car
e c
n head off potentially very expensi
ve problems.
It costs about $1,800 for a baby to spend a day in intensive care, compared with the $1,300 it would cost Medicaid to pay for a woman's prenatal care, delivery and postpartum care, said Roy Jeffus, director of the state's Medicaid program.
"It just makes good sense," said Bob Trevino, the state director of the League of United Latin American Citizens, an organization focused on the advancement of Hispanics. "In our view, women who don't get proper prenatal care are at large risk. And I think Hispanics are probably one of the largest prenatal birth defect risk categories."
While expanding benefits for mothers-to-be, the change has some people calling the move "anti-woman."
Th
e change worries some abortion-rights advocates who consider the move a politically motivated attempt to elevate the status of a fetus and infringe on a woman's right to end her pregnancy.<b
r><b
r>Un
der the Med
icaid plan, "the egg would have different rights than the woman carrying it
," said Wanda Stephens, president of the Arkansas chapter of the National Organization for Women, in an emailed statement. "This is another underhanded antiwoman attempt to make an egg a person."
The Medicaid change is the result of an option offered in 2002 that allows states to cover immigrant women's prenatal care using Arkansas' State Children's Health Insurance Program.
Only six other states - Illinois, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Rhode Island and Washington - have opted to use this option to provide prenatal care services, said Donna Cohen Ross, outreach director for the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a Washington-based organization that works on federal
and state fiscal policies. The center conducts an annual survey of all Medicaid programs in every state.
Until the change goes into effect, many immigrants don't qualify fo
r Medica
id for p
renatal care or an
y other medical service. Arkansas Medicaid is not offered to illegal immigrants or legal immigrants wh
o have been in the country less than five years.
Many of these women when pregnant go to local health department units, which provide prenatal care primarily for uninsured women and those who qualify for Medicaid. Roughly half of the estimated 2,000 foreign-born Hispanic women who give birth in Arkansas annually get prenatal care at the state Health Department, said d*ck Nugent, the group leader of the department's Family Health Group.
Because of budget constraints and a growing number of uninsured - including many immigrants - some county health units have had a difficult time providing prenatal care for all the women who need it. The problem has been particularly pronounce
d in Washington County, where local hospitals have donated ultrasound services and money to help the Health Department continue to provide prenatal care services. In 2000,
Arkansas ha
d 73,690 for
eign-born residents, inclu
ding 40,741 who came between 1990 and March 2000, the U.S. Census Bureau reported. Among the fo
reignborn, 51,635, or 1.9 percent of the population, were not citizens.
Arkansas had 86,866 residents who considered themselves Hispanic or "latino." Benton County had 13,469 Hispanics; Washington County 12,932; Pulaski County 8,816; and Sebastian County 7,710.
Among cities, Springdale had 9,005 Hispanics; Rogers, 7,490; Fort Smith 7,048; Little Rock 4,889; and Fayetteville, 2,821.
Now that some of the Health Department's clients will qualify for new reimbursement, some advocates hope more women will be able to get prenatal care from local health units - or even private physicians.
"That would be a dramatic shift in how prenatal care is taken care o
f," said Kathy Grisham, director of the Community Clinic at St. Francis House in Springdale.
Community Clinic cares for indigent patients but does
not provide pren
atal care. Grish
am has worked on a local task forc
e focused on financial aid for prenatal care. The Health Department's Nugent is less optimistic that Medicaid coverage f
or prenatal care will substantially change the department 's capacity to provide maternity services.
"It will help," he said, "but it will not be an overwhelming amount of assistance."
The Health Department recently reduced its 2005 budget by $5.3 million, citing reimbursement problems in three service areas, including prenatal care.
If 1,000 women - the maximum expected - take advantage of the Medicaid coverage, the new benefit could cost the state's Medicaid program $1.3 million.
Still, Trevino, the League of United Latin American Citizens advocate, said he believes the program is a good fit for
Arkansas. (He also serves as an economic development policy adviser to Gov. Mike Huckabee.)
"In Arkansas we felt like if we run the numb
ers, the population
is still small enoug
h that it wouldn't break the state, b
reak the bank, if you will, in terms of Medicaid to cover the expectant mother and her child."
The money will come from the state's ARKids B program, which re
ceives up to about $34,154,500 annually from the federal government. In this program, the federal government pays about $4 for every $1 Arkansas spends on medical care. Still some people who support tighter immigration enforcement are uncomfortable with the idea of using government funds to provide services for people who are not U.S. citizens.
"Immigrants should not be a public charge on the American public," said Jack Martin, special projects director for the Federation for American Immigration Reform in Washington, "and we, therefore, think that it is reasonable for the
public to resist efforts to extend taxpayer-supported benefits to either illegal immigrants or to legal immigrants" until they become
American citizens.
Martin said pregnant
immigrant women should be deported, instead of
given benefits to accommodate their pregnancies.
Mark Krikorian, executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies, an independent, nonprofit research organization in Washingto
n, supports immigration control, but he said he believes withholding government benefits is the wrong approach. Politically, he said, prenatal care is a particularly difficult benefit to deny immigrants. "Prenatal care is one of the toughest issues there is with government services for immigrants," he said. "Even throwing little kids out of school seems to me less of a problem than this issue of prenatal care."
Added to that incendiary political issue, the change to Medicaid stirs emotion on both sides of the abortion debate.
The Medicaid change has a charac
teristic in common with the recent federal legislation that makes it a separate crime to harm a fetus during an assault on the
mother. Both recognize a f
etus as a person entitled to
certain benefits.
"We support that because
we believe that life begins at conception," said Rose Mimms, executive director of Arkansas Right to Life, an advocacy group opposed to abortion. "So it seems very reasonable to us to want to protect that chi
ld from the very moment of its life at conception through its prenatal life to birth."
But abortion-rights advocates say the new Medicaid benefit puts them in an uncomfortable position of opposing a provision that would help immigrant women.
"It's Catch 22," said Marvin Schwartz, vice president of community affairs for Planned Parenthood of Arkansas and Eastern Oklahoma.
It's a "fairly complex and very clever approach, a two-pronged approach," he said. "On one level giving a medical service provision
[and] at the same time weakening the strengths of the pro-abortion community."
<a href='http://cochise
observer.tripod.com/NEWS/AR_Pre
natalCareFleec040425.html' targ
et='_blank'>http://cochiseobserver.tripod.com/NEWS/AR_...lee
c040425.html</a>