Wisconsin mom fights for postpartum Medicaid coverage

In 2022, Kate Duffy, 37, launched an Instagram account called Motherhood for Good after becoming a mother herself. She says she wanted to engage her friends, specifically about the important issue of Medicaid coverage of postpartum care for low-income new mothers.

Duffy said she felt like the messaging coming from Wisconsin politicians about extending Medicaid coverage for postpartum mothers in the state  “wasn’t landing” with the more affluent women in her Greendale community. 

The 2025-27 state budget proposal released by Wisconsin Gov. Tony Evers on Feb. 18 includes the expansion of postpartum coverage under Medicaid from 60 days to one year.

Wisconsin and Arkansas are the only two states in the nation that have not implemented such an expansion.  

“To be frank, a lot of my community are women who live in the suburbs. They’ve probably never been on government assistance, so they don’t even know the difference between Medicare and Medicaid. They’re just words they hear,” said Duffy, who has about 70,000 followers on social media, about 60% of whom are women in Wisconsin. “Women are just dropped off of coverage and then they’re falling through the cracks.”

A person in Wisconsin is eligible to receive Medicaid coverage during pregnancy if their income is up to 306% of the federal poverty line, which is an annual salary of $15,650 for one person and $21,150 for two people. Currently, 60 days after giving birth, the income threshold for Medicaid coverage returns to the federal level. If the person makes above that income, they would then have to purchase private health insurance. 

The Wisconsin Department of Health Services Maternal Mortality Review Team reviews all deaths in the state that occur during or after the end of a pregnancy. According to a report the team issued in 2024, in 2020, there were 49 pregnancy-associated deaths, or deaths within one year following the end of a pregnancy. The causes include suicide, substance use disorder, and overdose, as well as conditions such as high blood pressure and sepsis. 

“I have a good friend who had a near-death experience three months after she had a baby and started going septic,” Duffy said. “So there’s so many things that can happen, and when these women can’t get the care that they need, we just tell them, You’re done, and they’re forgotten about, and if they already were struggling with postpartum depression, I mean, good luck getting to them after that.” 

Dr. Jasmine Zapata, the chief medical officer of the Wisconsin Department of Health Services, said Medicaid expansion “would be a huge win for birthing people and women in Wisconsin and actually has implications for infant mortality rates.”

The expansion of Medicaid coverage of postpartum care has been a bipartisan effort in the state but has been blocked by Republican State Assembly Speaker Robin Vos, who said in January that it was “unlikely” he would allow the Assembly to vote on a bill on expansion. “Our caucus has taken a position that expanding welfare is not a wise idea for anyone involved,” Wisconsin Watch reported Vos said.

Vos has objected to expansion before. During a Q&A with Wisconsin Health News in 2023, Vos  said, “The problem with Medicaid is not that we don’t give away enough free stuff to people. We give away too much free stuff.” He argued that the federal income limit for Medicaid eligibility was too high and said, “When you make a choice to have a child, which I’m glad that people do, it’s not the taxpayers’ responsibility to pay for the delivery of that child.” Extending coverage to one year postpartum “makes it worse for Medicaid,” he said. 

TAI reached out to Vos’ office for comment but did not receive a response. 

Duffy said that when she started to bring personal human stories to discussions of Medicaid expansion, moms in her community were better able to understand the issue. 

“The postpartum period is something that every single mom can empathize with and understand the difficulties of that, and they all can understand that you don’t snap your fingers and go back to normal after 60 days,” Duffy said. “And when you talk to them more about what’s happening and the injustice of this all, that’s when it really starts to connect. … This is one of those things that we should all be able to get behind. I don’t care if you are publicly, politically active or not; we don’t leave other moms behind.”

According to data from Medicaid.gov, about 42% of births in the United States are covered by Medicaid. In 2023, Medicaid covered 34.7% of births in Wisconsin, the March of Dimes reported.

Emily Tseffos, a former Democratic candidate for the State Assembly, runs a grassroots coalition focused on extending postpartum care for those on Medicaid. 

Tseffos said, “I would argue that the health of our mothers, our babies, and our families affects everybody in the state of Wisconsin.” 

“Whether you’re looking at it from a societal perspective and taking care of our most vulnerable, or an economic perspective and making sure that we are not putting families in a lurch financially, but also our health care system, putting undue stress on all of that, you’ll feel the impact, and no one is immune to this issue,” Tseffos said. 

Evers has proposed $24 million to extend Medicaid coverage, a change that would affect over 4,000 moms, his budget proposal says. 

“There’s certainly a partisan lens to social welfare programs that I think Robin Vos is hard-lined on, but I think in this one in particular, we dehumanize people on programs like Medicaid so often and for so long that we’ve forgotten that those are our neighbors,” Tseffos said.