Senators Seek Maternal Mortality Information from HHS, CMS

Several U.S. senators are giving the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) and its Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) one more week to respond to a list of questions to address maternal mortality in the Medicaid and Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP).

Fourteen senators from both sides of the aisle sent a letter on Oct. 9 to HHS Secretary Alex Azar and CMS Administrator Seema Verma stating that the rates of maternal mortality increased by 26 percent from 2000 to 2014. “This troubling trend makes the United States an outlier among every other developed country,” they wrote. “We write to you to request that (HHS and CMS) focus on strategies to reduce maternal mortality rates …, including for pregnant women and mothers enrolled” in Medicaid and CHIP. Further, the senators asked the agencies to review existing data to provide recommendations about what can be done at the federal, state and local levels to reduce mortality and improve health outcomes for all mothers and their children.

The letter includes several questions to which HHS and CMS must respond. These include:

• What is the rate of maternal and infant mortality for individuals covered by Medicaid and CHIP, and are there limitations or inconsistencies in this data?
• How is CMS using voluntary health measure reporting by the states to inform CMS guidance and policy development?
• How many states have implemented a value-based payment approach and/or new maternal care delivery model to improve maternal and infant health outcomes?
• How do states and CMS evaluate the quality of prenatal and postnatal care provided by various types of health care providers?
• What other initiatives are HHS and CMS undertaking to reduce the rate of maternal mortality and morbidity, particularly in programs like Medicaid and CHIP?

The responses to these questions are due Nov. 1. It will be interesting to see how the agencies reply to these questions and how that might affect the Medicaid and CHIP programs and its beneficiaries.