Health Disparities in Minority Communities

Floor Speech

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Ms. McCLELLAN. Mr. Speaker, I thank Mr. Clyburn for yielding. I am honored to be here tonight on behalf of the Congressional Black Caucus to commemorate National Minority Health Awareness Month, but I am also here for personal reasons.

Mr. Speaker, 10 years ago today, I was 31 weeks pregnant. I was excited. I was expecting a girl. I had placenta previa, so I knew we were going to have to schedule a C-section. We had just scheduled it. She was due June 30, but we had scheduled a date in early June because my doctor did not think it likely that we would make it to June 30.

I went to bed still planning out are we going to get to go on a babymoon before she arrives. I woke up the next morning, and my placenta ruptured. I started bleeding. I was panicked. My husband called the ambulance. He said I was as white as this piece of paper.

We rushed to the hospital, and I remember hearing the doctor in the emergency room saying that everything looked fine. Then less than three seconds later he said that we have got to go right now because both of our heart rates dropped. I remember thinking as the oxygen mask came on my face, please let me be asleep before my doctor starts cutting, and I was.

I woke up a few hours later, and I had a baby girl, but I didn't get to see her until the next day. As I waited those 24 hours to see if she would make it, I realized that I almost became one of the Black women who are three times more likely to die due to pregnancy-related complications than White women.

I was a State legislator at the time. This was my second child. I was on the Joint Commission on Health Care, and I began to really look into the maternal mortality crisis that we have in this country. We have higher death rates for women than many other Third World countries.

I started looking at the data of why women were dying. Many of these deaths were preventable. There were differences. There were differences in the rate at which Black women died compared to White women, and there were differences in the reasons.

In Virginia, the data showed us that for White women they were more likely to die due to postpartum depression leading to suicide or other mental health-related issues leading them to take their own life or to self-medicate and die of drug overdoses.

For Black women in Virginia, their deaths were more likely caused by co-morbidities, mostly cardiovascular issues. Many pregnant women, as I began talking to them, many Black, pregnant women had their first heart attack either while they were pregnant or shortly thereafter. Oh, by the way, the disparities in cardiovascular care for Black women and men: The death rate is higher than for White men and women.

I began to look at how do we put policies in place that address the maternal mortality crisis as a whole, but the disparities in particular. I also noticed that many Black women died within the first year of childbirth, yet Medicaid for many of these women didn't cover the first year, so they didn't have health insurance when their first cardiac event or pregnancy-related event that led to their death occurred.

We looked at expanding Medicaid to cover the first 12 months after birth, which we did here at the Federal level, as well. We looked at expanding Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act and how would that address the maternal health crisis. We did expand Medicaid in Virginia, and we began to see that for many Medicaid expansion patients they ended up healthier because they were connected to medical help, getting regular checkups to catch things before they became deadly. All of that now is under attack.

As we approach April every year, I like to commemorate National Minority Health Awareness Month through some sort of roundtable, but I especially like to commemorate Black Maternal Health Week because as I said when I started, that one is personal.

As I got ready for Black Maternal Health Week, I wanted to first figure out is there a theme this year on which we should focus our efforts. As I got ready to prepare my social media posts, as I got ready to prepare the topics that I would have if I had a roundtable, I thought, well, the Office of Maternal Health, the Office of Minority Health, they usually announce a theme every year.

I went to the Office of Minority Health website, and sure enough, in January they did announce a theme for 2025: Advancing Commitments to Eliminate Health Disparities.

Then in the January post on their Facebook page they invited the public to join them all year as they shared resources to help address health disparities impacting racial and ethnic minority groups. I thought, great, that is exactly what I want to do during National Minority Health Awareness Month and Black Maternal Health Week. I went to the web page expecting to pull down those resources that I could share with the communities that I represent. ``File not found.''

Then I thought, well, maybe the Office of Minority Health at CMS has something. ``File not found.'' Well, maybe the National Institutes on Minority Health and Health Disparities has something. ``Page not found.'' That is what the website said in the very month that we are supposed to renew our commitment to addressing healthcare disparities that cause Black women to be three times more likely to die in childbirth than White women, that cause Black men to be more likely to die of prostate cancer than White men. I could go down the entire list of the statistics. You heard some of them earlier today.

In the very month we are supposed to reaffirm our commitment: ``File not found.''

Well, I shouldn't be surprised because with the President's war on diversity, equity, and inclusion and DOGE going through and finding every web page that had certain words without actually looking at what are those web pages doing, that they would take these pages down. Imagine my dismay when I discovered that the Office of Minority Health at both HHS and CMS are now gone.

The very employees who collect the data, who look at the underlying causes of why these women are dying anyway, let alone at three times higher rates than White women, they are gone. Well, at least we can continue to fight for the policies.

I am on the Energy and Commerce Committee that was told in a markup on March 7 to find $880 billion worth of cuts. The Congressional Budget Office it says can't do that unless there are cuts to Medicaid. I have heard some of my colleagues say, well, we are not going to address vulnerable populations, and they include pregnant women in that. The healthcare disparity doesn't start the day you get the positive pregnancy test. It starts when you aren't getting access to the care that you need to address diabetes or hypertension or the cardiovascular issue that is bubbling.

As we see Medicaid expansion at risk, all of the progress we began to make to address these disparities is at risk.

Mr. Speaker, this is not politics. This is not theoretical debates over the role of the Federal Government. This is people are dying, and our Declaration of Independence that we will celebrate the 250th anniversary of next year says that: All men--and I would add women--are endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights: life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Life is number one.

When the Federal, State, and local governments work together with the private sector, our research hospitals, the nonprofit community, when we work together to identify the reasons for the disparities and put policies in place that address them, people's lives are saved. When we strip those policies away, when we strip away the very workforce implementing them, people will die.

That is why I am proud to stand here as a member of the Congressional Black Caucus and say we will fight to protect those policies that save our people's lives.

Tomorrow, when my daughter turns 10 and I think back at how I almost became that statistic but how we are also coming up on the 1-year anniversary of when her uncle became the statistic of a Black man more likely to die because of a heart attack, I am going to follow the theme of the 2025 National Minority Health Awareness Month: Advancing Commitments to Eliminate Health Disparities. I am going to fight any effort by our President or my colleagues on the other side of the aisle to put barriers in our way and to remove the very policies that help save lives to begin with.

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