Health Reform Bill Alters Family Planning Funding
The health reform bill House lawmakers considered today has drawn an unexpected band of supporters: abortion opponents. The measure — designed to improve health care delivery and cut waste in a system where costs are spiraling — contains a provision aimed at doing what GOP lawmakers have fought to do all year: restrict funding to Planned Parenthood.
The measure requires the family planning programs run by the Department of State Health Services (DSHS) — which treat some 220,000 women a year — to prioritize funding to state or locally-run public health clinics, then private full-service clinics, over clinics that only provide family planning ...
Comments (17)
Aldo Merino via Texas Tribune on Facebook
What complete children we have in the legislature. How about doing something productive for once rather than engaging in petty, ideological battles?
Lee B. Weaver via Texas Tribune on Facebook
I'm beginning to think the members of the almost entirely male Texas Republican delegation either (a) didn't have much luck with the ladies as young men or (b) are fiercely denying some big secret about their true feelings toward the opposite sex, because DAMN they sure do hate women. A lot. I mean, seriously. Obsessed much?
Margaret Metcalf via Texas Tribune on Facebook
what do you think?
Gregory S Windham via Texas Tribune on Facebook
Excellent. Now to run Annie's List, their blood money, and puppet candidates out of the State.
Tom Osen via Texas Tribune on Facebook
Imbeciles.
Lisa Ahrlett via Texas Tribune on Facebook
Wow, so when it comes to healthcare liberals cry that everyone has a right to it. Now that PUBLIC TAX PAYER money is being funneled to clinics that care for EVERYBODY rather than mostly women who need abortions (way few people serviced at these clinics), it's the wrong thing to do? So just pick and chose when everybody should be paid for by tax payers and when it should only go to serve your ideologies. All of you people are no better. You believe that abortion is ok so God forbid money be taken away from clinics that preform abortions. it's no different when you all cry because tax money goes to a religious group or a group that supports the 2nd amendment or any other ideal you think is for the ignorant or racist. Get a life, no body wants their money to go to a cause they don't believe in. Quit crying.
Joel Stanford via Texas Tribune on Facebook
Wow, Lisa, so you think that abortion is purely a religious issue and not a personal health care decision based on individual ethics? PP provides many services other than abortion that state funded clinics do not. This money already wouldn't go towards providing abortions, instead it is basically a way to deflate PP's overall budget. Planned Parenthood saves the taxpayer bucketloads of money. Defunding them to appeal to fundamentalists following bronze age mythology is shortsighted.
Lee B. Weaver via Texas Tribune on Facebook
And the First Place Award in the "Gosh, Those LOOK Like Words and Sentences, But I'll Be Darned If They Make Any Sense" category goes to Lisa!! Give her a hand, everybody!
judy burns
I will never understand why those who oppose abortion also oppose the services offered by PP and other family planning clinics, i. e. birth control, screenings for STDs and other health issues. In many years of working with young women as a social worker, I frequently assisted in connecting them to Planned Parenthood. Because they received family planning counseling, never once were these visits for the purpose of obtaining an abortion.
Judy Burns via Texas Tribune on Facebook
I have never been to a Planned Parenthood clinic in Texas that "preformed" abortions. I have, however, helped (as a social worker) many young women obtain birth control and screening for STDs and other health issues at Planned Parenthood. You see, if family planning is practiced, abortions are not necessary.
Lee B. Weaver via Texas Tribune on Facebook
I think my favorite part of Lisa's comment was how she managed to NOT include women seeking abortions within her definition of 'everybody.'
You may have to read it a couple of timesto realize that's what she said - perhaps with the assistance of Gibberish-to-English translation program - but it's in there!
Aldo Merino via Texas Tribune on Facebook
It never ceases to amaze the utter ignorance people espouse on this topic (e.g. Lisa's post).
This is a bill specifically designed to single out Planned Parenthood, which provides a whole host of basic, vital services to women statewide, with the implicit aim of targeting abortion, despite the fact that no public money can be used for those services by federal law, that such services constitute around 3% of what PP does (and not at all locations), and that it would cost the state, not to mention women's health, far more in health care costs to perform those services if PP cannot, while doing absolutely nothing to reduce the number of abortions performed.
That they have to jump through hoops like poison pills and being indirect in order to not having the bill constitutionally shot down, in a special session originally designated to deal with the legislature's failure to pass a budget, which costs us all thousands and thousands of dollars a day, should be indication of just how far of an legislative overreach this is. The
bill modifications would ensure wasteful spending of public money by inefficiently prioritizing other providers in a counterproductive and unnecessary move to further harm PP.
If your goals are to a) do nothing to minimize the need and safety of abortions, b) reduce the availability of basic health care to thousands of Texas women, c) waste taxpayer money in paying legislators in a special session to do things other than what they need to, d) introduce economic inefficiencies into the health care system, e) add more bureaucratic red tape to health service providers, then, by all means, support this horrendous bill.
Bill Conley via Texas Tribune on Facebook
Cool. I don't suppose the bill includes plans to increase funding in the future for those clinics, does it? For all the additional sick babies with poor parents they'll have to take care of, right? Not to mention that many more parents who will have to sacrifice their own health to take care of their kids. What? No? Why, I'm shocked! Well, that's probably just an oversight that they intend to fix. Of course they will...
Terri Russo via Texas Tribune on Facebook
So federal family planning money would first go to a clinice that served men and women before a clinic that served women?
Uh, I don't get the logic at all. There is a lawsuit in there somewhere I am sure.
Billie Veach via Texas Tribune on Facebook
Please people read the beginning.. it is a multipurpose health
clinic to keep the mothers healthy, test they cannot afford..
children tests and welfare.. tax payer money DOES NOT
ALLOW ABORTIONS...AND THAT IS THAT, CANNOT SAY IT
ANY CLEARER.. however, I believe if a woman goes somewhere to have an abortion because she is left alone to
care for the children and suddenly the husband runs off with
another woman.. had you rather her have a legal abortion
or go back to the coat hanger days and die leaving the
children without any parents.. what happens to those
children.. also, that woman does not answer to us she answers to her religion or God.. we are not to be judges.
none of us are perfect...Religion has nothing to do with
planned parenthood.
Mary Lynn VanZandt Neill via Texas Tribune on Facebook
There is so very much wrong with the original assinine statement,don't even know where to begin,and have less faith it will ever reach the members of the Lege.Many couples DO practice "planned parenthood" and still find themselves needing abortion counseling. Note the ads for a pill "the morning after your birth control failed".NOT a morning after,per se,but...things happen.duh.
Glen Hill
I have always wondered why non-doctors who kill and unborn child face murder charges yet abortions are not considered murder when accomplishing the same thing. Planned Parenthood should be doing what the name implies...help couples plan for parenthood...abortion eliminates parenthood.