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Milwaukee County stops taking fathers to court to pay back Medicaid for childbirth costs

Prof. Tiffany Green, a health care economist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who has researched the impact of birth- cost recovery programs, said a study she conducted pointed to better child support payments when birth-cost recovery (BCR) stopped.

“With the caveat that our results of preliminary, we found that BCR cessation was linked to increased probability of paying support to birthing parents (i.e., mothers and other individuals who gave birth), and that the amount of that support increased,” Green told the Wisconsin Examiner Monday. That pattern appeared “particularly pronounced among the fathers of Black children,” although not among fathers of white children. Future research will explore possible explanations for those differences, she added.