As anti-choice lawmakers attempt to strip state and federal funding for Planned Parenthood branches across the country, a closer look at regional access to women’s health services reveals the devastating effects of hampering Planned Parenthood’s work.

Mother Jones notes that one county in Tennessee provides a case study for what happens when conservative politicians successfully defund Planned Parenthood clinics. After officials in Shelby County, TN stripped funding for Planned Parenthood and awarded it to a conservative religious clinic instead, the services provided to local women dropped by a staggering 93 percent:

Local officials decided that instead of giving that Title X money to Planned Parenthood for health screenings, STD tests, and birth control, they’d instead give it to Christ Community Health Services, a religious organization that refuses to provide abortions or refer women to others who would provide them. The organization also does not offer emergency contraception, and is reportedly looking to expand to create more “crisis pregnancy clinics” that offer “counselors who can discuss adoption and other life-affirming options” with women.

But it turns out that Christ Community Health Services has not been nearly as efficient at using Title X funds to provide family planning services, reports the Memphis Flyer (via Women’s Health News). Between July 2011 and June 2012, more than $500,000 of the $1.3 million grant the county received was not used at all. Hannah Sayle reports that Christ Community Health Services was averaging just 51 Title X visits per month in early 2012, compared to Planned Parenthood’s 841 visits in August 2011.

As women’s health advocates point out, case studies like these illustrate the consequences of diverting funding away from Planned Parenthood and expecting other health clinics to pick up the patient load. Some, like Christ Community Health Services, are certainly not equivalents to Planned Parenthood in terms of the family planning services they provide. Others, like the cash-strapped clinics across Texas that are being forced to close their doors, clearly don’t have enough resources to carry on the work that local Planned Parenthood chapters typically do. Using Planned Parenthood as a symbol in the ongoing War on Women has serious, disastrous results for the low-income women who do not have other options when it comes to their reproductive health care.

Bill Clinton covered a lot of ground in his policy-rich speech at the Democratic Convention last night. But one under-appreciated issue he brought to the fore was the identical plans Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan have put forward for Medicaid — which provides health coverage for seniors, the disabled, and low-income families — and how they would decimate the program:

They also want to block grant Medicaid and cut it by an third over the coming ten years. Of course that’s gonna really hurt a lot of poor kids. But that’s not all. Lot of folks don’t know it, but nearly two-thirds of Medicaid is spent on nursing home care for Medicare seniors who are eligible for Medicaid… And a lot of that money is also spent to help people with disabilities. Including a lot of middle class families whose kids have down syndrome or autism or other severe conditions.

Watch it:

To fill in the details on Clinton’s points:

Romney and Ryan’s Medicaid cuts plans are worse than their Medicare cuts. Their proposal to privatize Medicare with a premium support system doesn’t kick in for a decade, and even then Ryan’s growth path for the program would be the same as Obama’s. Their cuts to Medicaid, by contrast, start immediately and cut the program 35 percent by 2022 — a loss of $810 billion over that time period. And that excludes their repeal of Obamacare’s Medicaid expansion, which cuts out hundreds of billions more.

Their cuts hurt current seniors. Clinton misspoke here. 38 percent of Medicaid spending goes to 9 million Americans who are “dual eligibles” for both Medicaid and Medicare, but a good portion of them are non-elderly Medicare beneficiaries. But 1.9 million of Medicare’s seniors rely on Medicaid for long-term care, and would immediately start seeing annual decreases in their benefits of around $2,500 due to the Romney-Ryan Medicaid cuts.

Their cuts hurt children and the disabled. As Clinton pointed out, Medicaid assists millions of American families with members suffering from mental and physical disabilities. Half of the program’s 63 million enrollees are children, and rural children are particularly at risk: according to Erik Stegmen, Manager of CAPAF’s Half in Ten Campaign, rural children have less access to private insurance than urban children, rely on Medicaid more, and an expansion of the program decreased the rate of uninsured rural children from 21 percent in 1997 to 9 percent in 2005. Medicaid even provides help with 40 percent of all maternity stays. All these benefits would come under Romney and Ryan’s knife, leaving millions of vulnerable Americans with no obvious alternatives.

They block grant Medicaid. This move would shift Medicaid’s costs to state budgets, leaving them to shoulder any added demands on the program alone. It could also allow right-wing state governments to undo benefits currently required by the federal government. The counter claim by Romney, Ryan and their defenders is the states’ newfound freedom will lead to greater efficiencies in the program. This is wildly improbable. Medicaid’s reimbursement rates to providers are already as lean as they get — about one third lower than Medicare’s. The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services found that in 2011, Medicaid made $21.9 billion in improper payments, or a bit under 10 percent of its budget for that year. Eliminating all of this waste would still leave Medicaid well short of making up a loss of one third of its budget, much less getting anywhere close to Medicare’s reimbursement levels. And if the cuts don’t come out of reimbursement rates then they’ll probably come out of enrollment, kicking 14 to 27 million people off the program. (The repeal of Obamacare’s Medicaid expansion would end coverage for an additional 17 million or so.)

In sum, Romney and Ryan’s plans for Medicare, misguided as they are, are far less draconian and radical than their plans for Medicaid. Bill Clinton did the country a service by highlighting the latter in his speech last night.

In a recent speech, Rep. Steve King (R-IA) assailed new federal regulations that improve the nutritional standards of meals served in schools. He called the new standards, which come from the 2010 Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act, rationing:

“This is the nanny state personified,” the Republican from Kiron said during a noon speech to about 20 people at the Webster County Republican Party headquarters. [...]

He said parents have approached him and have said things like “My kids are starving in school. My kids are being rationed on calories.”

Though King says calories are being limited, the Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act (HHFKA) actually expands student access to food by promoting breakfast programs and providing nation-wide funding to after-school programs that serve meals and snacks for at-risk kids and teenagers. Prior to the act, only 13 states and Washington, D.C., had funding for such programs. The healthy kids program improves nutritional standards for school lunches from “science-based standards” and recommendations from the Institute of Medicine. Such improvements are necessary. According to the Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), childhood obesity has tripled in the last 30 years, and more than one-third of children and adolescents were obese in 2008.

It should come as no surprise that King has come out against healthy school lunch standards. King is a staunch defender of “pink slime,” a mixture of leftover beef trimmings and fat that is sprayed with ammonium hydroxide and used as filler for hamburger meat. Coincidentally, he received $45,000 in campaign contributions from the meat industry. Also, he has proudly demonized vegetarians in public.

King’s comments ignore many important facts regarding childhood health and the importance of good eating habits. The Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act attempts to correct many of the food-related problems in our school systems. To call its regulations “the nanny state personified” is irresponsible and intentionally mischaracterizes the bill’s goals.

– Greg Noth

Despite the widespread outcry against Rush Limbaugh’s and Bill O’Reilly’s sexist smears against Sandra Fluke earlier this year — when they claimed she was a “slut” who wants the government to pay for her “social life” — other far-right commentators haven’t quite grasped why these types of attacks are offensive. After Fluke took to the stage of the Democratic National Convention last night to articulate the issues at stake in the ongoing War on Women, conservative media took to Twitter to bash her for “whining” about needing free birth control for the activities that go on in her “bedroom”:

Aside from misrepresenting Fluke’s point that women should not have to pay more than men do for essential preventative health services, including contraception, these smears degrade Fluke as a woman. In fact, Fluke speaks for the one in three American women who report struggling to afford birth control, and does not need to apologize for either her sexuality or her demand for equitable health care. And although some commentators decried Fluke for “only” talking about birth control rather than addressing other political themes, as if contraception is merely a petty and personal issue, access to health services like contraception is inextricably linked to economic issues.