With more than 200 maternity units closing in mainly rural hospitals due to financial concerns, adequate prenatal care is becoming a challenge to pregnant women.
CNN reported that the planned May closure of Bonner General Health's maternity ward in Idaho is just one of the latest units to shut down, forcing pregnant women to travel dozens of miles to give birth.
Leandra Wright, 40, who is pregnant with her seventh child, told the news outlet that she will now have to go some 45 miles to give birth, something that worries her because of her history of quick labors.
"My fifth child was born on the side of the highway," Wright told CNN. "It was wintertime, and my hospital at the time, in California, was about 40 minutes away, and the roads were icy, so we didn't make it in time. It worries me not to have a doctor there and worries me to have to go through that."
According to the report, 217 hospitals have closed maternity units since 2011, and another 13 have been announced in the past year alone.
A recent report by the healthcare consulting firm Chartis said that there are more than 2.2 million women of childbearing age across 1,119 counties in the United States that live in areas without birth centers or hospitals offering obstetric care, the CNN report said.
According to the report, money is a major factor determining the closure of the units.
Low Medicaid reimbursement rates, which pay about $6,500 per delivery, account for around 42% of birth payments in the United States, compared to the average reimbursement of about $15,000 paid per birth by private and employer-sponsored insurance.
"Medicaid funds about half of all births nationally and more than half of births in rural areas," Dr. Katy Kozhimannil, a public health researcher at the University of Minnesota who has conducted research on the growing number of maternity care "deserts" told CNN.
Larger hospitals in more urban areas can offset the payment disparity because more of their patients have the higher paying private, employer-provided insurance, or can also make up the difference by offering neonatal intensive care units, Dr. Sina Haeri, a maternal-fetal medicine specialist and CEO of Ouma Health, a company that provides virtual prenatal and perinatal care to mothers living in maternity care deserts, told the news outlet.
"If you have a NICU, that's a substantial revenue generator for a hospital," Haeri said in the report.