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New Hampshire Board May Not Renew Planned Parenthood’s Pharmacy Licenses

By Amanda Peterson Beadle on Aug 17, 2012 at 5:45 pm

After Republicans attempted to shut down New Hampshire’s Planned Parenthood branches by blocking state funds, an anti-choice organization is now claiming that Planned Parenthood is ineligible to dispense prescription contraceptives when the clinics gained federal money to remain open instead.

But the New Hampshire Board of Pharmacy announced that it needs more information from Planned Parenthood of Northern New England before it could renew the clinics’ pharmaceutical licenses:

The New Hampshire Board of Pharmacy has decided that Planned Parenthood of Northern New England needs to provide additional information before it can renew the organization’s pharmaceutical licenses.

New Hampshire Right-to-Life has pushed the regulatory board to deny Planned Parenthood its licenses, claiming the clinics lost their ability to dispense birth control pills, RU-486 and other related prescriptions in June 2011 when the Executive Council killed a contract with the organization to provide women’s health and family planning services at clinics around the state. [...]

State law requires a licensed pharmacist to dispense prescriptions, but it contains an exemption for family-planning clinics if they operate under contract with the New Hampshire Department of Health and Human Services. Planned Parenthood’s contract is with the federal Health and Human Services agency.

The board said Planned Parenthood’s application was incomplete because it did not include written protocols for safely dispensing medication, so it will reconsider the information at another meeting.

A Planned Parenthood official said the board’s decision allows Planned Parenthood clinics in New Hampshire to continue providing contraception and medications “under a limited retail drug distribution license” while the board considers their renewal application. “While we find the board’s request that PPNNE submit information beyond what is required by the application process to be unprecedented and inconsistent with the license renewal standards, we will nonetheless seek to cooperate with the board — to keep our renewal process on track and to ensure that the needs of our patients are not disrupted,” said Jennifer Frizzell, senior policy adviser for Planned Parenthood of Northern New England.

NEWS FLASH

Kansas Officials Drop All Remaining Charges Against Planned Parenthood | The first criminal prosecution against Planned Parenthood has ended now that prosecutors in Kansas have dropped all of the remaining charges against the women’s health organization. “The dismissal of these charges is a strong blow against those who have been using this case to further their political agenda to eliminate access to abortion care and harm Planned Parenthood,” said Peter Brownlie, president of Planned Parenthood of Kansas and Mid-Missouri. Former Kansas Attorney General Phill Kline (R) brought the criminal complaints against the group in October 2007. The 107 charges he filed against Planned Parenthood included 23 felonies, and a state judge dismissed 26 other charges two weeks ago.

By Amanda Peterson Beadle on Aug 17, 2012 at 4:31 pm

NEWS FLASH

Protesters Outside Of GOP Rep’s Town Hall Bemoan His Support For Ryan Budget | FOLSOM, California — More than two dozen protestors gathered outside Rep. Dan Lungren’s (R-CA) Folsom town hall on Thursday to express their disappointment at his recent votes in Congress. The crowd decried the congressman’s support for Paul Ryan’s budget and told the California Republican to “stop the war on women” after Lungren voted to defund Planned Parenthood. Scott Sanders, a Navy veteran, was particularly incensed: “They say they support veterans, and yet Lungren supports Ryan’s budget which cuts $11 billion from the Veterans Administration,” he yelled to the crowd of protestors.

POLL: Republicans Oppose Paul Ryan’s Proposed Changes To Medicare

By Tara Culp-Ressler on Aug 17, 2012 at 1:36 pm

Although vice presidential candidate Paul Ryan has put Medicare back in the news by touting his drastic plan to phase out the traditional program, Americans’ opposition to the Republican ticket’s plan for Medicare is consistent across party lines. Two new polls from the Kaiser Family Foundation find that neither Democrats nor Republicans favor overhauling the government program, and a majority of Americans report they would trust Obama over Romney to make the right decisions about health care going forward.

A Kaiser poll released yesterday finds that the future of Medicare is at the forefront of voters’ minds. Among all the health issues that may come into play in the presidential election, voters rank Medicare as their top priority, closely followed by the high cost of health care. A full 73 percent of respondents consider the Medicare program extremely or very important:

Furthermore, respondents are uneasy about what a Romney-Ryan ticket could have in store for health care as a whole, including programs like Medicare. Seventy two percent of respondents would put their trust in President Obama when it comes to making decisions about health care reform, while just 40 percent would trust Romney on the same issue.

In the other Kaiser poll — which was conducted jointly with the Washington Post in late July and early August, before Mitt Romney announced his running mate — respondents were asked whether they preferred continuing the Medicare program as it is currently set up or switching to a plan like the one Ryan proposes, which would give seniors government grants to buy health insurance. Fifty eight percent of the total individuals surveyed favored the current system over Ryan’s plan, including a majority of the respondents in the Republican, Democrat, and independent groups. In fact, slightly more Republicans than independents reported they would rather not make changes to Medicare, 55 percent to 53 percent respectively.

NEWS FLASH

Study: Global Smoking Rates Remain High | In a survey about tobacco use of 250,000 people in 14 nations, findings show more than 50 percent of men smoke or use tobacco, and 11 percent of women are smokers. But the number of people quitting is very low, dropping below 20 percent in some countries like China and India. “We haven’t seen percentages like this since the 1950s in the U.S.,” Gary Giovino, the lead epidemiologist on the study, told NPR. In comparison, about 20 percent of Americans are smokers. Only $1 is spent on smoking prevention programs in poor countries for every $9,100 received in tobacco taxes, so researchers say governments need to invest in anti-smoking campaigns. If not, the medical costs from 850 million smokers globally could be huge.

By Amanda Peterson Beadle on Aug 17, 2012 at 12:00 pm

Politics

4 Ways Paul Ryan’s Budget Would Devastate The Poor

By Igor Volsky and Pat Garofalo posted from ThinkProgress Politics on Aug 17, 2012 at 10:30 am

National media attention has focused on Rep. Paul Ryan’s (R-WI) drastic restructuring of the Medicare program, detailing the Vice Presidential candidate’s efforts to transform the current benefit guarantee into a “premium support” program for future enrollees.

But Romney/Ryan’s most devastating changes would impact programs that serve society’s most vulnerable citizens. American who rely on Medicaid, food stamps and Pell grants won’t be afforded the luxury of retaining their existing benefits, should Romney and Ryan implement their plans; these programs would experience immediate reductions if the Ryan budget becomes law (via CBPP):

1. CUTS FOOD STAMPS BY $133 BILLION: Ryan’s budget would send the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP, or food stamps) back to the states as a block grant and cut the program by $134 billion. According to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, “an average of almost 10 million people would have to be cut from the program in the years from 2016 through 2022 to achieve the required savings.” If the cuts were to come from benefits, rather than kicking families out of the program, “All families of four — including the poorest — would see their benefits cut by about $90 a month in fiscal year 2016, or more than $1,100 on an annual basis.” Ryan continually claims that the food stamp program is “unsustainable,” even though the numbers show that’s simply not the case.

2. CUTS MEDICAID BY 1/3: Ryan would treat Medicaid in the same way: transform the exiting matching-grant financing structure into a pre-determined block grant that will not keep up with actual health care spending and send it back to the states. This would shift some of the burden of Medicaid’s growing costs to the states, forcing them to — in the words of the CBO — make cutbacks that “involve reduced eligibility for Medicaid and CHIP, coverage of fewer services, lower payments to providers, or increased cost sharing by beneficiaries—all of which would reduce access to care.” The reductions to Medicaid kick in right away: between 2013 and 2022, the budget makes $1.4 trillion in cuts to Medicaid —a 34 percent reduction. As a result, states could reduce enrollment by more than 14 million people, or almost 20 percent—even if they are were able to slow the growth in health care costs substantially.

3. 30 MILLION AMERICANS WOULD LOSE HEALTH COVERAGE: Romney and Ryan would repeal the Affordable Care Act, including the subsidies for middle-class Americans to purchase coverage and the expansion of the Medicaid program for lower-income Americans. As a result, more than 30 million Americans would lose access to insurance. The popular regulations that prohibit insurers from denying coverage to people with pre-existing conditions and rescinding coverage would also be repealed.

4. CUTS PELL GRANTS FOR 1 MILLION STUDENTS: Ryan consistently claims that increases in financial aid are driving up the cost of higher education, even though evidence doesn’t back him up. The budget Ryan authored, according to an analysis by the Education Trust, would eliminate Pell Grants entirely for one million students. In 2011, 74 percent of Pell Grant recipients had family incomes of $30,000 or less. These cuts would come despite the fact that the price of a college degree has skyrocketed 1,120 percent over the last three decades.

Restrictive Anti-Abortion Laws Force Tennessee Clinic To Close

By Annie-Rose Strasser on Aug 17, 2012 at 9:35 am

An abortion clinic in Tennessee has shut its doors after 38 years, citing new laws that make it unable to continue operations.

Earlier this year, Tennessee passed the Life Defense Act, requiring every clinic in the state to have at least one clinician with admitting privileges at a local hospital. While Volunteer Women’s Medical Center in Knoxville was briefly able to comply, their one clinician who had admitting privileges recently died.

No other providers were able to get the privileges after the law went into effect on July 1 of this year.

In a letter posted on the Abortion Care Network website last week, Executive Director Deb Walsh wrote that the new law “made it illegal for our local, Board Certified OB-GYN physician to perform abortions in our fully licensed Ambulatory Surgical Treatment Center.” She expressed sadness at having to close the clinic after its decades of operation:

“I’ve been able to keep the doors open and the phone staff working up until this week,” Walsh wrote in the letter, titled “End of an Era.” “We’ve been working on legal remedies, injunction, etc., but I was unable to bridge the financial gap of paying the monthly lease and operating expenses without knowing when we could resume seeing patients.”

Sadly, this is exactly the effect lawmakers had hoped for when they passed the Life Defense Act. As in Mississippi, where the state’s only abortion clinic may soon be shut down, there are no medical reasons why an abortion clinician should need admitting privileges.

Rather, such laws — known as Targeted Regulation of Abortion Providers (TRAP) — intend to take woman’s choice out of the equation by pitting a clinic against a legislature. In doing so, lawmakers hope to be seen as regulators of commerce rather than anti-abortion advocates trying to restrict access to health services. But needless regulations are, in fact, just a way to limit access, as evidenced by the clinics like this one that they force to needlessly close.

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