Currently, Wisconsin and Arkansas are the only two states that have not expanded healthcare coverage for new moms. On today’s show, host Dana Pellebon speaks with ProPublica reporter, Megan O’Matz, about her investigation into Robin Vos’s rejection of postpartum Medicaid expansion in Wisconsin.

Even though there is bipartisan support in the Wisconsin legislature to expand Medicaid coverage for up to a year for low-income new moms, Robin Vos has blocked a bill that would do just that. O’Matz reports that Vos broke with other anti-abortion members of his party and that this decision is timed with the overturning of Roe v. Wade. She calls it hypocritical not to give new moms healthcare past two months and claim you’re “pro-life” because the early months after birth are a vulnerable period when parents often need ongoing medication and treatment. O’Matz also tracks the influence of business interests on Vos’s decision, including the Uihlein family’s financial contributions to the Republican Assembly Campaign Committee.

They also talk about O’Matz’s most recent article on Sen. Ron Johnson’s support of a discredited Wisconsin doctor whose new book on chlorine dioxide–a bleaching agent used as a disinfectant and deodorizer–spreads misinformation. Sen. Johnson has written a blurb on the book’s dust jacket and has joined the doctor on panels on vaccine skepticism even though chlorine dioxide is not a drug or a medicine approved for therapeutic use. O’Matz says that we’re in a place where people don’t trust the CDC and that studies cited in Dr. Kory’s book are not scientifically rigorous.

O’Matz says that she got her start in Florida, where open records laws support journalists’ work of keeping elected officials accountable. However the newspaper industry has been contracting over the years due to influence from media conglomerates. She’s now with ProPublica, a nonprofit, independent newsroom that seeks to deliver a level of accountability to readers by reporting on how people with power use it. They rely on open records, data, and fact checking to foster reader trust.

Megan O’Matz is a ProPublica reporter covering issues in Wisconsin and throughout the Midwest. She has been with ProPublica since 2021 and writes about voting processes in Wisconsin, a swing state, as well as stories about family court, prosecutorial blunders and predatory lending. She has also worked at the South Florida Sun Sentinel. She and her colleagues were finalists for the 2006 Pulitzer Prize for stories about widespread fraud in federal disaster aid programs after a series of devastating hurricanes. She also shared in the 2019 Pulitzer Prize for reporting on the failures of school administrators and police officers in connection with the Parkland school shooting.

Featured image of a pregnant person holding their belly via Wikimedia Commons (CC0 1.0).

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