Texas ranks 14th of preterm babies

Can you imagine, Texas ranked 14th for preterm babies? "San Antonio has the dubious distinction of having the highest percent of low birth-weight and premature babies among the largest cities in the state."Imagine this cost: "Hospital costs for a premature baby average about $79,000 and can be as high as $1 million." The sad part about this is "Women usually are enrolled in prenatal care programs about four months before they deliver and then lose Medicaid coverage 60 days after a birth." Sometimes it is not easy to have no health insurance to cover.

In this article, "State must tackle early birth rate" of My San Antonio discussed about ranking Texas as 14th for preterm babies. That statement had gotten my attention and got me stunned. I wondered how this huge state would let that happen. Now Texas needs to take care of that and prevent growing percent of preterm babies to worse especially the costs. It got me wondering, what happen? Lucky, the state and the Texas lawmakers are sensitive to this need and focusing on this issue.

The legislatures are currently pending to addressing this issue by requiring the Health and Human Services Commission to develop a concept paper. The Human Service Commission are asking the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services to establish a pilot program in Bexar County to extend the government-funded health coverage for women who have given birth to premature or low-weight babies. The Texas lawmakers are considering recommending the idea of extending "Government-funded health-care benefits for 18 months to women who have given birth to premature babies to ensure they maintain good health and help prevent subsequent preterm births." If Texas lawmakers use this strategy, then this could help to reduce percent of statistic for preterm babies. This would benefits for those mothers' health and babies’ health sake. The risks of the babies' health would increase a child’s mortality rate and increases the odds for mental retardation, vision problems and cerebral palsy.

This article is worth to read because first, it showed that legislatures do concern about this as health safely issue. Second, we should pay attention and find a way to help those low-incomes mother to make the best out of this. Even thou, this may be very costly but if this succeed, then the percent will decrease, the mothers and babies would be healthier.