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Wisconsin Planned Parenthood Next Target in GOP Attack

By Intern on Jun 17, 2011 at 5:09 pm

After passing its two-year, $66 billion budget through the legislature last night without a single Democratic vote, Wisconsin looks to be the fourth state nationwide to cut all state and federal funding for its Planned Parenthood clinics. Indiana, Kansas, and most recently North Carolina have all passed such amendments in the past two months in an effort to decrease the ease with which women can receive abortions.

Once Gov. Scott Walker (R-WI) signs the Wisconsin budget as he is expected to do, all nine of Planned Parenthood’s health centers in the state will lose the funding they need to offer services to 19,000 uninsured patients each year. None of these clinics even offer abortion services to their patients. The Wisconsin budget also imposes severe restrictions on the state’s BadgerCare Family Planning Program that may lead to its termination.

The president of Planned Parenthood Advocates of Wisconsin, Teri Huyck, released a statement expressing her disappointment that the Wisconsin GOP would place political ideology over health benefits for thousands of the uninsured.

“It is greatly disturbing to me that some politicians’ personal beliefs are trumping our shared responsibility to make sure women and men have access to preventive reproductive health care, which is not only essential for their own lives, but also a cost-saver for all Wisconsin taxpayers,” she said.

But Wisconsin is not the only state where conservatives have pushed an anti-abortion agenda over the interests of an uninsured lower class. Indiana, Kansas and North Carolina have all passed legislation ending funding for Planned Parenthood, and Tennessee, Texas and Oklahoma are all working on similar measures.

Indiana: The first state to end funding for its Planned Parenthood clinics, Indiana cut all state funding for the organization along with $1.4 million in Medicaid funds. Planned Parenthood is currently seeking a preliminary injunction against the law and claims the measure is unconstitutional as Medicaid funds can be used at any qualified health provider. Yesterday, the U.S. Department of Justice issued a briefing siding with the health organization against the state law. Planned Parenthood operates 28 health centers across Indiana and serves around 9,300 Medicaid patients.

Kansas: In May, Gov. Sam Brownback (R-KS) signed the law banning the use of over $300,000 in federal funding under the Title X Family Planning Program in Planned Parenthood clinics, redirecting the money to government clinics instead. Unlike in Indiana, the measure does not prevent Medicaid patients from using the clinics.

North Carolina: On June 15, the state legislature overrode Gov. Bev Perdue’s (D-NC) veto on its proposed budget plan and thereby cut all state and federal funding—totaling around $434, 000 annually—for its health centers. GOP lawmakers avoided the legal troubles Indiana is facing by staying away from Medicaid, but Planned Parenthood is still considering filing for an injunction. In a poll conducted recently, 57 percent of the state’s voters oppose the funding cuts to Planned Parenthood and its programs.

Tennessee: The day after passing the state budget, GOP lawmakers learned that the amendment they added to ban public money for Planned Parenthood had been secretly gutted before the late-night vote. In response, conservatives across the state called for the governor to revoke Planned Parenthood’s Title X funding. By June 13, all but one county had done so, even though none of Title X funds can be used to pay for abortions, and thereby removed support from the state’s nine Planned Parenthood clinics and their 9,000 patients. Currently, the public money goes toward providing the organization’s family planning services for low-income patients.

Protesting the adverse effect that such a move puts on the poor, president and CEO for Planned Parenthood of Middle and East Tennessee Jeff Teague said, “Tennessee is a rural and poor state, so it’s gonna put an additional burden on the population least likely to afford it. In a lot of cases, that means they are going to lose access to health care.”

Texas: GOP lawmakers are currently working on keeping Planned Parenthood from receiving nearly $20 million in public funding as a part of the Texas Medicaid Women’s Health program. None of the health centers run by the organization in the state offer abortion services, yet all 122,000 of its patients could suffer if the House and Senate can reach an agreement on the bill that currently includes the funding ban as an amendment.

Oklahoma: An amendment that would have removed funding from Planned Parenthood’s Women Infant and Child program died with the bill in a legislative committee on May 26. The program provides nutritional services and food vouchers to pregnant women and women with small children. It does not fund abortions.

Who will be next? In just the past few months, GOP lawmakers have targeted Planned Parenthood in states across the nation to promote their moral stance on abortion over the healthcare rights of poor and uninsured women. The Hyde Amendment may have prevented any taxpayers from paying for abortion services since the 1970s, Planned Parenthood may only spend less than three percent of its budget on abortions and hundreds of thousands of patients may depend on these clinics for their health needs, but conservatives will stop at nothing to have a pro-life talking point for their next campaign.

–Sarah Bufkin

Yglesias

Speeding Transition Away From Employer-Based Health Care Is a Good Idea

By Matthew Yglesias posted from ThinkProgress Yglesias on Jun 17, 2011 at 11:10 am

Senator Ron Johnson and former CBO Director Douglas Holtz-Eakin have a Washington Post op-ed that builds on a discredited McKinsey study claiming that some huge share of American employers are planning to take advantage of the Affordable Care Act to reduce their labor costs and improve their workers’ access to health care. I’m reliably informed that this isn’t actually the case, and the opportunity to improve the business climate and workers’ health care outcomes isn’t nearly as available as Johnson/DHE say. But it’s worth taking note of their scare story to recognize how un-terrifying this is:

The other of us, as a former businessman, knows what it’s like to purchase coverage for employees. There are many employers who would happily get out of the practice of providing health insurance, if they could do it without hurting their workers. Obamacare will encourage them to do so. In the current system, most employers are highly reluctant to drop health coverage for employees because they don’t want their workers to be financially exposed. But under Obamacare, instead of paying $15,000 for family coverage, an employer can choose to pay a $2,000 fine, pay more in cash wages, make his employees eligible for a huge government subsidy and come out ahead. Confident that their employees are also gaining, millions of employers will follow this logic.

The reason we’re supposed to find this scary is that it means the cost of the Affordable Care Act will go up since there will be more ACA tax credits to buy insurance on the exchanges. That’s true, but it ignores the fact that employer-provided health insurance benefits are already subsidized because they’re not taxed as income. We’d be replacing one form of subsidized insurance for another form of subsidized insurance. The real difference here isn’t in the availability of subsidies, it’s just in the form of the insurance options available to people. Health insurance exchanges will offer a larger overall risk pool that will be better able to perform the basic insurance function. They’ll also expand the range of options available to people. In an exchange, an insurance company needs to sell insurance to you. Right now, an insurance company needs to sell insurance to your employer’s HR director.

Pulling out, this is to me an example of the kind of phoniness of a lot of the debate over the ACA. Back when Holtz-Eakin was running policy for John McCain’s campaign, their proposal for health care reform was to rescind the tax subsidy for employer-provided health insurance and replace it with a tax credit that would go to directly to workers. In other words, to implement exactly the kind of shift in health care financing that they’re now warning against. The difference is that the McCain plan would have dumped people into an unworkable un-regulated market for individual purchase of health insurance while the ACA will create a workable risk pool. Now that’s not to say that DHE has no real objections to the way the ACA pulls this off. He probably thinks the subsidies are too generous, and that the revenue base for the ACA is too progressive. Conservatives generally prefer stingier programs and dislike progressive taxation. But it would be much healthier to just have that debate, which is a kind of banal quantitative left vs right argument. Instead, we seem stuck in this dialogue of fake objections and weird scare stories.

NEWS FLASH

Less Educated Die of Cancer At Greater Rates | Although the number of people who die each year from cancer is decreasing over all, the difference in the cancer death rate between high school graduates and those with at least a college degree is growing, according to a new report released Friday by the American Cancer Society. The greatest gap is observed with lung cancer, where people who have not yet attained a four-year degree died at rates four to five times higher than their educated counterparts. — Sarah Bufkin

By Guest Blogger on Jun 17, 2011 at 11:00 am

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