Grassroots Network: URGENT ACTION: e-mail Obama at Change.gov TODAY!

Dear Friends,

As our new President is inaugurated today, let's celebrate "A New Birth of Freedom" with e-mails to the new administration about birth and midwives!

The Big Push for Midwives posted this request this morning -- a great idea to hopefully get attention to the need to recognize CPMs at the federal level as part of health care reform. (Simply put, recognition at the federal level, as part of medicaid/medicare legislation, is the doorway to all insurance reimbursement.)

Read the post below, then send your message -- it can be brief, will only take you a minute. JUST DO IT! And don't hesitate to forward this message to other birth/midwife-friendly lists and friends!

Sincerely,
Susan Hodges, "gatekeeper"


From Steff Hedenkamp of THE BIG PUSH FOR MIDWIVES:

Greetings!

In honor of today's Inauguration theme, "A New Birth of Freedom," we at The Big Push for Midwives are asking all of you to take a few minutes to send an email with the subject heading "A New Birth of Freedom" to our new president today. Click on the URL below and send a very simple but powerful message to the Obama administration:
"Please be sure to include Certified Professional Midwives (CPMs), who specialize in providing out-of-hospital maternity care, in federal healthcare reform."
http://change.gov/page/s/healthcare [takes you to a window for e-mailing your message]

Our goal is to submit 5,000 emails by midnight today. That number will put us ahead of every other grassroots movement that has submitted comments to the Obama administration and will ensure that our issue expanding access to out-of-hospital births attended by CPMs gets the attention it deserves.

Please send a quick email notification to this list or to The Big Push for Midwives Facebook wall after you post your comment so we can keep a running tally.

Keep in mind that we are at a crossroads. Healthcare reform is now inevitable and will be based on the reimbursement categories and rates for Medicaid and federal employees. Private insurers are widely expected to follow suit. So if CPMs are not included as recognized providers in federal healthcare reform, there is a very real possibility that home birth families will not be able to receive insurance reimbursement, regardless of whether they have private or public healthcare insurance.

Please act now.
Thank you very, very much.

Steff Hedenkamp | Communications Coordinator | The Big Push for Midwives Campaign | 816.506.4630
steff@thebigpushformidwives.org
TheBigPushForMidwives.org

Envisioning a safer, less-costly model of maternity care in the U.S.