The Stupak abortion-insurance ban may be the biggest problem with the House's draft of the health care reform bill, but it isn't the only problem. Wendy Mink and Dorothy Roberts of StopFamilyViolence.org have identified another area in which the Senate version of the health care bill is superior to the House version. Section 1713 of the House bill would authorize home visits by nurses to investigate mothers at home for various purposes ordinarily associated with social work, not health care. Namely:
(1) Improving maternal or child health and pregnancy outcomes or increasing birth intervals between pregnancies.
(2) Reducing the incidence of child abuse, neglect, and injury, improving family stability (including reduction in the incidence of intimate partner violence), or reducing maternal and child involvement in the criminal justice system.
(3) Increasing economic self-sufficiency, employment advancement, school-readiness, and educational achievement, or reducing dependence on public assistance.
The only thing on this list that a nurse is trained to do is "[i]mproving maternal or child health and pregnancy outcomes..." The rest falls under the heading of social work--and making it part of the health care system is invasive, paternalistic, and an extremely inefficient use of funds.
The Mississippi Department of Human Services receives thousands of real complaints about abuse and neglect of minors and vulnerable adults that it is unable to investigate because the State of Mississippi hasn't hired enough social workers to cover these investigations. Congress could address human services disparities more effectively if it adequately funded social work--but trying to subcontract social work through the health care system, creating a two-tiered system where nurses act like social workers but don't have the power or the training to do the job right, is a recipe for disaster. It's not even an efficient use of funds, when we consider the fact that nurses make substantially more money, on average, than social workers (an average of +/-$42,000/year versus +/-$33,000/year).
We have already learned, via legislation that gives local law enforcement the power to pretend that they can enforce federal immigration law, that public servants are not interchangeable--and that when they are treated as interchangeable, civil rights violations are likely.
Section 1713 should either be revised so that it only addresses health care needs, or stripped from the bill entirely. Take action here.
Related: National Advocates for Pregnant Women (NAPW)
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