Sometimes good news comes in the form of "It could have been worse." Concerning the budget cuts planned -- until recently -- to a successful program for low-income pregnant women in North Carolina, it was definitely going to be worse. The president of the N.C. Public Health Association said the planned reductions, on the order of 40 percent, would "essentially eliminate" the program.
That would have been a disaster. Under the Maternity Care Coordination program, local public health departments across the state offer nursing and social-work support for low-income mothers-to-be. The program is one of several initiatives intended to lower infant mortality in North Carolina -- an effort that over two decades has whittled the state's shamefully high infant death rate down to a much-improved level.
And the benefits go beyond the young lives saved. The cost of infant intensive care is considerable, to put it mildly. Avoiding problem pregnancies and reducing childbirth complications among Medicaid recipients definitely pay off for taxpayers.
Therefore, a 40 percent reimbursement rate reduction for Maternity Care Coordination, which the state Medicaid office had announced, was deeply unwise.
Health departments protested, and the state Medicare director says he didn't need to be pressured to do the right thing anyway. So now the reduction won't be so deep or the damage so devastating. Funding cuts to the Maternity Care Coordination program and related children's-health programs will be held to around 20 percent.
That's the "It could have been worse." The legislature, scrambling to balance a recession-wracked budget, mandated tens of millions of dollars in Medicaid "case management" cost cuts. Those reductions will stand. That's the 20 percent (or 19).
Everybody has to suffer some, we're told. But suffer the low-income pregnant women and their children? When it appears that the cost to the state of going from a 40 percent program reduction to 20 percent is only about $1 million, that's hard economics indeed. The state has stepped back from the brink here, but for safety's sake it should step back still farther.
