In 1995, Philadelphia had 19 hospitals with obstetric units, places where local women – about half of them on Medicaid – could go for prenatal care and, ultimately, to deliver their babies. Then these hospitals started closing, not one or two as occasionally happens in the life of many communities, but three, four, five of them…
By 2005, nine of these 19 hospitals in the city had closed, a group accounting for more than 30 percent of all of the deliveries that had taken place in Philadelphia in the mid-90s.
Now, some 15 years after the spate of closures started – brought on, by most accounts, because of financial pressure – we have some better sense of what this really meant for the city. A new study, published in the journal Health Services Research, concludes that Philadelphia’s newborn mortality rate temporarily increased by nearly 50 percent in the first few years after the closures began.
