Clinging tight to its rock-bottom ranking in maternal health and mortality, Arkansas earned an odious new superlative this week.
With Wisconsin lawmakers’ bipartisan 95-1 vote to extend Medicaid coverage to new mothers for a full year postpartum, Arkansas is now the only state in the Union that yeets vulnerable new moms off of subsidized health insurance and leaves them to fend for themselves.
Wisconsin’s laudable step forward for women’s health came at the same time Arkansas moved demonstrably backward. Arkansas Advocates for Children and Families sends word that Medicaid coverage data for the fourth quarter of 2025 shows nearly half of new Arkansas mothers who’d relied on Medicaid to pay for health care through their pregnancies lost that coverage within months of giving birth.
“Newly released postpartum Medicaid coverage data reveals a crisis unfolding in Arkansas: 44% of postpartum mothers lost Medicaid coverage in the fourth quarter of 2025—the worst quarterly performance since tracking began,” a release from Arkansas Advocates for Children and Families said.
It’s possible these new mothers who lost Medicaid were able to find affordable health insurance elsewhere, through a spouse, an employer, or with Obamacare, but we don’t know for sure. From AACF’s release:
We have been told that women may be able to enroll in other insurance options like the marketplace, but it is our understanding that DHS does not have access to data to determine that. With skyrocketing marketplace premiums, it will become increasingly difficult for women to take that route. And all of this happening mere weeks after giving birth makes it even more crucial to close this coverage gap by expanding postpartum coverage.
“This data should alarm every Arkansan who cares about maternal health,” said AACF Executive Director Keesa Smith-Brantley. “Women are losing coverage right when they’re most vulnerable to life-threatening complications. We need action now.”
Arkansas reliably ranks among the lowest of the low in the U.S. for maternal mortality. Horrifically, data has shown that a vast majority of these deaths are preventable with more access to care.
So why is Arkansas the lone holdout still refusing to provide health care coverage to new mothers at an incredibly vulnerable, sleep-deprived, exhausted and fuzzy-thinking time in their lives? Mainly it’s because Gov. Sarah Sanders doesn’t want them to have it.
The latest effort to extend Medicaid coverage to get new mothers cared for during this dicey time failed in the 2025 Arkansas legislative session, under pressure from the governor’s office not to pass it. The supermajority Republican Legislature went along with the governor’s wishes, even though the bill to extend postpartum Medicaid was sponsored and championed by Republicans.
A similar Republican-led effort in 2023 also failed, and in fact didn’t even receive the courtesy of being considered.
How many more moms will die needlessly because the governor insists on keeping Arkansas first in stupidity and stubbornness?