• Rx Kids, a cash aid program for moms and babies, received a $270 million allocation in the recently passed state budget, said Rx Kids director Dr. Mona Hanna.
• The additional funding will allow Rx Kids to expand to more low-income communities and reach about 100,000 babies over the next three years.

Rx Kids, the Michigan cash aid initiative for moms and babies, received its largest funding boost yet in the newly approved state budget, setting the program up to potentially help tens of thousands more infants in the next few years.

The budget, which Michigan lawmakers sent to Gov. Gretchen Whitmer Friday, Oct. 3, includes $270 million for the fast-growing program — $20 million in Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) funding and $250 million from the Healthy Michigan fund as a one time allocation for three years.

It’s a “massive investment in our kids,” said Dr. Mona Hanna, director of Rx Kids and associate dean of public health at the Michigan State University College of Human Medicine.

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The program, which offers $1,500 mid-pregnancy cash assistance and then $500 a month up to a year of the baby’s life, already operates in 11 communities around Michigan. The additional funding will allow Rx Kids, a public and private partnership, to expand to more low-income communities and “lessens the load” on philanthropy and municipalities, Hanna told the Free Press.

“We anticipate being able to launch in dozens of new communities in Michigan. This amount of funding will help us reach about 100,000 babies over the next three years,” she said.

Rx Kids could start in communities that have already raised money, such as Ypsilanti and Saginaw. Still, the program needs additional funding to make it whole and take it statewide, Hanna said. Roughly 100,000 babies are born in Michigan each year.

Monique Stanton, president and CEO of the Michigan League for Public Policy, said in statement that the “significant downpayment in the expansion of the Rx Kids program will help babies and parents get a strong start toward health and economic security.”

Last month, leaders of Rx Kids released research papers evaluating how the program affects economic stability, maternal mental health and birth outcomes in Flint, the city where the program first began and where roughly a third of the population lives below poverty. Researchers found a drastic drop in evictions and fewer preterm births and neonatal intensive care unit admissions.

Among the findings in one report: evictions fell by about 91% among Rx Kids-eligible Flint moms in 2024 after childbirth, compared to Flint women who had babies the year before, and postpartum depression declined, too, from 46% to 33%. Rx Kids was also associated with a reduction in neonatal intensive care admissions, down 29% or 68 fewer admissions during the study period, another report found.

Rx Kids has so far distributed nearly $15 million to about 3,600 families, as of Sept. 30. The program is open to eligible participants from counties in the eastern Upper Peninsula and the west side of the state to parts of metro Detroit, and has garnered tens of millions in public and private dollars as well as bipartisan interest from lawmakers. Proposed legislation seeks to take the program statewide.

There’s broad appeal for a program like Rx Kids, Hanna said.

“What legislators understood is that this program was addressing the polycrisis that the state is facing,” she said. “It’s addressing housing affordability and childcare, and it’s providing immediate relief so families can buy things that they need. It’s adressing inflation. It’s addressing maternal infant health disparities.”

Contact reporter Nushrat Rahman at nrahman@freepress.com.