Devastating Effects of Sequestration Cuts to Maternal And Child Health Programs and Research
Floor Speech
Ms. SCHAKOWSKY. Thank you, Mr. Speaker, for yielding to me for a very important hour.
I want to begin with Elodie Michaud, this beautiful, beautiful baby and hope that everyone will think about Elodie as every child, as any child, as your child. Because what I rise to talk about today is the importance of protecting very important maternal and child health programs and research, some wonderful things that our country does to make sure that children like Elodie, regardless of their circumstances and where they live and how much money their parents make, will be able to grow up healthy and happy and productive in our country.
Investments in maternal and child health improve the well-being and quality of life for women and children and families all over the country while actually reducing government costs. So as we deal with all of the issues of the debt and the deficit, I want to make sure that everybody is keeping Elodie, and children like her and her mother and her father and her family, in mind and making cuts that really make sense and avoiding cuts that absolutely make no sense, that don't save money, and certainly don't make our country any better. The investments that we make help children remain healthy, achieve success in school, and become productive members of society.
While we all agree that we want to tackle our fiscal challenges, we want to make sure that we take the kind of balanced and sensible approach that reduces our deficit, puts our fiscal house in order, and protects the health of women, children, and families. So we should all agree, both sides of the aisle, that we want to increase revenue to tackle our budget deficits and ask those who can afford it--the wealthier individuals and profitable corporations--to pay their fair share so that we don't ask children and families, like Elodie's family, to bear the burden.
Elodie certainly had nothing to do with creating the deficit, and many families that the Elodies of the world live in had nothing do with creating the deficit. Asking them to pay more doesn't make any sense. We need to find more savings in the bloated defense budget and waste, fraud, and abuse throughout many different systems. Obviously, we want to get rid of unnecessary and duplicative programs that we don't need, and we should go very carefully through our budget. We don't want to do it at the expense of children.
When we talk about sequestration, these are automatic budget cuts that will go through if we don't resolve the fiscal problems that we have right now. These are, I would argue, inefficient, across-the-board cuts that will be made. And even though some programs for vulnerable Americans are protected, others would be severely cut. We should not allow this.
American families shouldn't be paying for a budget deficit largely caused by things like two unpaid-for wars and two unpaid-for tax cuts that disproportionately benefited the wealthy and Wall Street gone wild, which led to the worst recession since the Great Depression. Our budget should not be balanced on the backs of vulnerable Americans, including women and children. Funding programs that assist vulnerable women and children have already experienced serious cuts in recent years, and we shouldn't be asking more from these safety net programs.
We also want to ensure that we don't replace sequestration, these automatic cuts that will go into place, with something even worse. Some alternatives are being considered that would actually do even more harm than sequestration to women and children. Although Medicare beneficiaries are protected under sequestration, some proposals would make cuts and/or change Medicaid into a block grant. That means giving just a sum of money to the States pretty much to do what they want with and not necessarily covering the children and poor people, poor families that need Medicaid support.
In the United States of America, Medicaid covers more than 40 percent of all births and covers one in three children. Think about that. Forty percent of all births and one in three children are in families that qualify for Medicaid support. That means that they're low income enough to be able to qualify for Medicaid, and we certainly don't want to do something that would make that unavailable and so we can continue to have the birth of healthy children.
Sequestration would devastate our public health system, impeding our ability to bend the health care cost curve, to prevent illness, to cure diseases, to ensure access to quality health services, and to ensure the healthy development of our children.
Sequestration will eliminate nearly $1 billion in Federal funding for programs and research designed to promote and protect the health of women and children. These cuts will hinder our ability to extend quality health care services to women and to families.
I want to talk about a very important and often under attack program that we call title X, and that is family planning services, family planning clinics. I also want to talk about the title V maternal and child health services block grants, two programs that reduce barriers for low-income women and children to access critical health care services and support. If we go to these automatic cuts, again called sequestration, we will be cutting $24 million in funding to title X clinics, decreasing Federal funding for the only dedicated family planning program to its lowest point in a decade. Title X clinics are critical and vital components of our health care safety net, providing critical access to breast and cervical cancer screening programs, prevention and treatment services for sexually transmitted diseases, and reducing the rate of unintended pregnancies, and reducing the rate of abortions. Access to family planning means that there will be less abortions in the United States.
For many women, title X clinics provide the only health care services that they ever receive in their lives. Without access, some women will have a harder time obtaining preventive care and treatment services. I'm talking about clinics that provide for up to 5 million women across the country. People like to think about Planned Parenthood as being the place where women can get abortions. That's a tiny part of their services, about 3 percent. Mostly they provide primary health care, including access to contraception. That's a very important service that we want to make sure that we don't cut.
The breast and cervical cancer screening program has been particularly important to providing access for women to early detection and screening services. In my State of Illinois--I'm from the Chicago area--title X clinics have caught 1,400 cases of cervical cancer and 713 cases of breast cancer over a 5-year period through the program. Sequestration cuts mean that 550 fewer Illinois women will be screened for cancer through this program, potentially costing women's lives because their cancer will be found too late without access to these lifesaving services.
I have been joined by one of the chief advocates for women in the United States of America who has been such an incredible and consistent advocate. I am so proud and grateful that Carolyn Maloney from New York has joined us. I would like to yield to the gentlewoman.
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Ms. SCHAKOWSKY. I want to underscore a pretty shocking statistic. You mentioned that the United States of America is 50th in infant mortality. Was that the statistic?
Mrs. MALONEY. Yes, yes. Here we are so wealthy, and yet we are 50th in the world in infant mortality.
Ms. SCHAKOWSKY. One being the best of course.
And you mentioned countries that we wouldn't necessarily expect would be better than the United States--Morocco, for example--and I'm sure there are a bunch of others. Yet the United States of America is 50th. Now, many people don't live in communities in which they see that, but that means that there have to be neighborhoods and communities in our country in which the infant mortality rate is probably very much like those in underdeveloped countries, where they rely on programs like the Women, Infants, and Children program which make sure that women don't have underweight births, children born of low weight.
The other thing you were talking about was the WIC program. It sounds like what you're saying is that we would actually be taking food out of the mouths of little children.
Mrs. MALONEY. Literally, literally, and we can't afford to do it. I would say it really is scandalous, absolutely scandalous.
We have to work together and prevent this from happening. Always, it's those parts of our society that can't afford a lobbyist, that don't have the money. Babies can't get jobs, and they can't hire lobbyists. So those programs that help poor children are going to be incredibly vulnerable with this sequestration. As I said, no one in their right mind would let this happen, yet the parties seem so far apart, and we don't seem to be getting the consensus that we need to make this happen. It's absolutely critical. Getting that consensus and not falling over that cliff is literally going to save lives, millions of lives.
Ms. SCHAKOWSKY. That's why, because we all get into the numbers game, we talk about a billion here and a billion there, et cetera, and that's why I wanted to put up a picture of the beautiful Elodie Michaud, who happens to actually be the daughter of Megan Michaud, who is my legislative director, so people can look at a face. This is the kind of face, if not Elodie's face, that we are talking about. Here's a mom and a baby, too. These are the kinds of faces that we want people to keep in their mind because there are real people behind these numbers. It's easy to say we are going to cut money from the WIC program, Women, Infants, and Children program, and then you realize what that would mean to perhaps this mother and this baby and so many across the country.
Mrs. MALONEY. I would say so. And providing the resources for WIC, which provides food literally for children, for babies and their mothers, this is a fundamental measure of health and well-being around the country, the birth of children and the health of their mothers; and yet we are doing so poorly in it. We are 50th in the world in infant mortality. That is not a statistic; that is a scandal.
Taking money away from the support of these young babies, these are not irresponsible people that aren't carrying their weight. These are not people that are slackers, like some of my colleagues on the other side of the aisle talk about some people. They're not lazy; they just happen to be born poor. And in the richest country in the world, we have to be there. As John F. Kennedy said, we cannot balance the budget on the backs of the poor. It's wrong.
Ms. SCHAKOWSKY. I thank you so much for your contributions--continuing contributions--to the well-being of women and children.
Yes, it's true that title V Maternal and Child Health Services Block Grant also does things like combat preterm birth, teen pregnancies, preventing chronic conditions, reducing disparities that are often present in our society. Let's be clear, not everybody has access to quality, affordable health services; and we want to improve that for more than 40 million women, infants, and children with special health care needs.
My State uses title V funding to reduce infant mortality, prevent teen pregnancies, and to ensure newborn screenings, to test children early on for things that can become chronic conditions and make sure that we take care of them early, and to coordinate care for children with physical disabilities. And the sequestration cuts will reduce critical funding to these efforts by over $1.65 million in Illinois alone. And with those cuts, 306,000 fewer Illinois women, infants, and children can be served.
Another really important area that I think a lot of people don't focus on is training of doctors. One of the things that sequestration, these automatic budget cuts, will do is reduce our ability to train pediatric physicians needed to ensure access to quality health care services to children and adolescents.
The Children's Hospitals Graduate Medical Education program trains more than 40 percent of general pediatricians and 43 percent of all pediatric subspecialists. Sequestration, automatic cuts, would take $21 million from this program forcing the reduction of residency slots, training of doctors, at Children's Hospitals across the country. We want to have these quality doctors that are able to make sure that they can care for our children.
I want to go back to something that Representative Maloney raised, and that's the WIC program--Women, Infants and Children--and immunizations. Experts agree that we must combat our deficit by bringing down the total cost of health care. That's true, but sequestration could result in just the opposite. The sequestration cuts to programs such as what we call the food stamp program, the SNAP program, or the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children and the 317 Immunization Program that will have their funding cut, if we are to reduce our national health care expenditures, we have to make sure that we fund those programs, those special nutrition programs and the immunization programs. They have a track record of saving money on future medical expenses.
Imagine, you're sending your children to school and they're sitting next to a child who simply cannot afford to get the kind of immunizations they need because those funds have been cut. None of us want that. I certainly don't want that for my grandchildren.
The Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children, the WIC program, improves health outcomes by providing nutritious food and nutrition and breast feeding education to women and young children. The WIC program has resulted in healthier pregnancies, healthier birth outcomes, and better growth and development of young children.
For every dollar we spend on a pregnant woman in the WIC program, as much as $4.21 is saved in Medicaid expenditures because WIC reduces the risk for preterm birth by 25 percent and low birth weight babies by 44 percent. These are successful programs.
In spite of the proven success and cost savings from the WIC program, sequestration would cut $529 million from the WIC program, which would allow the WIC program to serve approximately 735,000 fewer women and young children who are at nutrition risk, including 24,200 from my home State.
I see that I have been joined by a fearless and tireless advocate for women and children, particularly low-income women and children. This is my next-door neighbor and great friend and great Congresswoman from the great State of Wisconsin, Gwen Moore.
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Ms. SCHAKOWSKY. I want to just mention another cost-effective reason that we should avoid cuts. For example, we have immunization programs that decrease our future health care costs, and let me just give you the actual dollar numbers.
Every dollar we spend on the childhood vaccine series through this program saves our health care system $16.50 in future medical costs. By anybody's estimation, that's a really good return on investment, $16.50 back for every dollar that we spend on childhood vaccines.
Another aspect of sequestration cuts that would really hurt everyone are the cuts for research into the health challenges facing our country. The proposed cuts to the National Institutes of Health of almost $2.5 billion will cause irreparable harm to our research infrastructure and our ability to treat and cure diseases. Eliminating funding for almost 2,400 research projects will decrease our ability to identify new methods to prevent and combat health challenges such as cancer and diabetes, impede our ability to remain the world leader in biomedical research, eliminate jobs in local communities throughout this country, and hinder our ability to train and develop the future leaders of our biomedical sciences workforce. Research into costly diseases affecting mothers and babies will be especially harmed by these cuts.
The National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, which is responsible for conducting and funding research into these diseases, has the lowest percentage of grant applications funded of all the NIH institutes. The $106 million cut to the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development will likely worsen this trend and dampen our hopes of finding innovative treatments and cures for conditions that are affecting mothers and babies. These are just some of the examples of the devastating effect of sequestration cuts to maternal and child health programs and research. We can't afford these cuts.
So I just want to end this hour by saying that all of us want to make sure that we do put our fiscal house in order. But the real question is, at what cost are we going to do it to certain people? Who is actually going to pay? I think we all have an interest in making sure that we keep our children, our mothers, and our families healthy, well fed, and make sure that we raise productive children in this country.
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