Universal healthcare solves a lot of this. Not all of it. You still have to make healthcare available to those in rural areas. You still have to give high quality care to everyone regardless of skin color, beliefs, or other cultural factors. When people aren’t afraid of the bill, they go to the doctor more, but it doesn’t remove all the barriers to care.
I’m not sure that access to care is particularly the issue. I mean, it’s part of it, but when you have women like Beyonce and Venus Williams describing thier near death experiences while giving birth, there’s something else going on here.
Doctor education and bias, I believe, have alot to do with this issue. Women of color, esp. Black women, have the same rates of complications as white women do, but they die at a much higher rate. Many doctors don’t want to listen to thier patients or don’t recognize that diseases prevalent in communities of color take a larger toll than expected on a pregnant woman. Some doctors just cant or plain don’t want to take the time to ensure that the pregnancy is deveolping in a healthy fashion for both the mother and the child.
And, now, with abortion bans driving doctors out of states that already have an issue, the problem is only going to get worse.
Sorry if I wasn’t clear earlier, part of the point of that 3rd line was trying to acknowledge bias in medicine.
Ah, sorry.
No worries, just clarifying. Reading it back, it wasn’t clear that’s the point I was trying to make.
Had a coworker give birth recently. She told us it was “rough” and casually dropped that she hemorrhaged almost 2,000ml of blood. My jaw dropped. (The average person has~4l of blood, and she’s small)