Three years ago Pat Schneider received one of the highest service awards the University of Chicago Hospitals offers its employees–the Martin Luther King Jr. Humanitarian Award for outstanding public service. Then two months ago the university eliminated the midwife program she’s part of.
The midwives see themselves as a bridge between the fast-paced, often impersonal world of doctors and their patients, many of whom are intimidated by that world. While doctors might spend five or ten minutes with a pregnant patient per visit, the midwives will spend up to a half hour. Cooper, Mersch, and Schneider work with doctors as backup to offer their patients a full range of services, including episiotomies and C-sections. “We’ve always been part of a larger team at the university,” says Schneider. “We let our patients know all of their options.”
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
Despite their success, the midwives began to worry about their program earlier this year, when the hospital hired a new chairman of its obstetrics and gynecology department, Dr. Arthur Haney. Cooper says, “We heard all sorts of rumors that the university was going to head in a new direction and phase out midwives.”
Haney’s explanations didn’t placate the midwives’ supporters. As they saw it, the university was following one of the worst trends in modern medicine. Instead of looking for the best treatment for its patients, they said, the university was trying to wring as much money as it could from insurance providers–patients be damned. According to a fact sheet provided by the university, the midwifery program “has required an annual subsidy of $140,000 to $180,000 to survive.” But it isn’t clear what that figure includes. At any rate, the midwives’ supporters say, the central issue is that the hospital can maximize the amount of money it brings in for births by replacing midwives with doctors. In effect, the medicaid and private insurance reimbursement system encourages hospitals to charge more, not less, for basic services such as treating risk-free pregnancies, drawing up the overall cost of health care.
The midwives respond that though they no longer serve as midwives to low-income women because they were told they couldn’t, they still offer these moms counseling. “Last year,” says Cooper, “we did over 4,000 visits with low-income moms.”
“Women have been laboring and having babies for countless generations,” Weinstein said. “We deserve the fundamental choice of how our children will be brought into the world.”
Then, as if on cue, Moniqua Henderson, one of the midwives’ low-income teen patients, walked over. “The midwives are great,” she said. “They answer all of my questions. They really care about me and my baby, as opposed to the people at the board of health [clinic] where I used to go. I say the hospital should keep the midwives and just get out the word, ’cause more people would want to use them if they knew they could.”
