Jaeah Lee
writes This Is What Happens When You Defund Planned Parenthood:
About a year after Texas slashed its family-planning budget by two-thirds, with 50 clinics shutting down as a result, the Texas Policy Evaluation Project surveyed 300 pregnant women seeking an abortion in Texas. Nearly half said they were "unable to access the birth control that they wanted to use" in the three months before they became pregnant. Among the reasons: cost, lack of insurance, inability to find a clinic, and inability get a prescription. The state's health commission says Texas will see nearly 24,000 unplanned births between 2014 and 2015 thanks to these cuts, raising state and federal taxpayer's Medicaid costs by up to $273 million.
Nearly half of the women said they couldn't access birth control in the three months before they got pregnant.
In a state where half of all pregnancies were unplanned in 2011, and 1 in 3 women of childbearing age lacks health insurance, this is only going to get worse.
The Planned Parenthood clinics that anti-choice legislators booted from the state's Women's Health Program serviced nearly 50 percent of the program's patients. Along with contraceptive counseling, the clinics provided basic screenings for cancer, hypertension, and other key problems. There's no shortage of need: women in Texas suffer high rates of STIs and unintended pregnancies compared to national figures, and the state ranks 50th for diabetes prevalence in women. Nonetheless, Republican lawmakers went after the clinics in 2011, thanks to their long-standing beef with the organization, and forfeited tens of millions in Medicaid reimbursements to the Women's Health Program so they could defund Planned Parenthood clinics without breaking any federal rules governing how states have to spend Medicaid money.
Despite losing its highest-volume providers, the Texas Health and Human Services Commission insists the revamped, wholly state-run and state-funded Women's Health Program can reshuffle all the displaced patients and keep providing the same levels of care as before. But last October, researchers at George Washington University examined five Texas counties and found that in order to effectively replace Planned Parenthood, other clinics would need to increase their caseloads two to five times.
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Blast from the Past. At Daily Kos on this date in 2010—Radical Roadmap: Whack the Middle Class:
NPR's Guy Raz interviewed Wisconsin Republican Paul Ryan Sunday. It was another softball moment. You could almost see Raz nodding in agreement with the genial Congressman as he plugged his radical Roadmap for America's Future. It's this era's Contract with America, with Ryan as a more appealing, more narrowly focused Newt Gingrich, pitching a plan for completing the bumpy 30-year-long journey whose destination for middle-class citizens is the bottom of a cliff. A Deadend Plan for America.
Except, of course, for that hunk of the population that decades of upwardly transferring wealth has already fattened to the proportions of Mr. Creosote. For that Top Tenth, Ryan's plan offers more of the same smooth ride. Raz asked Ryan if he weren't concerned that the leadership of the GOP has failed to publicly back his plan. That's the line that Newsweek and the Cato Institute have taken, too. But why should Ryan worry? The leadership will eventually come around. The Roadmap, after all, would transform their Reaganomic fantasies into reality.
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Tweet of the Day:
Maybe if Sen. Portman had a family member w/ preexisting conditions who couldn't get insurance or health care, he'd switch on Obamacare
— @DavidCornDC via web
On today's
Kagro in the Morning show,
Greg Dworkin called in with news of the big multi-group gun policy meeting in Newtown, more on the need for hard data on gun incidents, and viewing gun policy as a public health issue. Friday's #GunFAIL day, and today's news brought up an interesting point about the enormous costs associated with recovery from wounds. In other news: Sen. Rob Portman (R-OH) flips on marriage equality after revealing his own son is gay. And in not-exactly-news: the Popes Benedict were a weird bunch, historically speaking. Lastly, we finish up discussing
Mother Jones's "All Work and No Pay."
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