Feds Will Not Renew Women's Health Program
Updated, 5:37 p.m.
The federal government will not renew the Women's Health Program, U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius said in Houston on Friday, the day after Gov. Rick Perry announced Texas would continue the program with or without the Obama administration's help.
On a tour of Houston's Ben Taub hospital, Sebelius said the state had been "put on notice" that the waiver program was ending, according to a report in The Houston Chronicle.
The news was not unexpected — Texas had been waiting for formal word from the federal government for weeks ...
Comments (38)
Vicki Rawlins McCuistion via Texas Tribune on Facebook
"Liberal" Center for Public Policy Priorities? think of them more as a watchdog helping concerned Texans understand some of the real impact of the decisions made in the dome
Abi Olvera via Texas Tribune on Facebook
He won't be able to find a way to pay for this program simply because he wants to keep breaking the law. It's ridiculous to make cash-strapped Texas foot the bill because he doesn't want Planned Parenthood to be a provider for this program which only gives out contraceptives! About half of the people who use this go to Planned Parenthood. He'll disenfranchise all these people; sacrificing their wellbeing for the wants of the anti-choice agenda. Texas is better than this. I've called 7 politicians and I hope more will too.
Mozelle Osborne via Texas Tribune on Facebook
Perry needs to go! Hes not only hurting out country, he has turned on the people that need out country and also need a functioning country. He is out of touch with reality! Rotten, Rotten!
Susan Topper via Texas Tribune on Facebook
I have lived in Texas all of my life and I am ready to move. My state is ruined and it will take years to fix the damage.
Karen Spivey-Cummings via Texas Tribune on Facebook
I called Rick Perry in support of PP funding. http://governor.state.tx.us/contact/
Karen Spivey-Cummings via Texas Tribune on Facebook
*liberal* = the truth! Not lies like the GOP spread.
Samdavis
The state cut education funding, cut social services, cut funding for state parks, cut funding for what little we have for regulatory agencies. Just where are they going to get this money?
Ron Blancarte via Texas Tribune on Facebook
Perry blasted Obama for politicizing this issue, when he took the first step in politicizing it.
On top of that, he is rejecting Federal money, just so he can make his point about keeping Planned Parenthood out of the loop.
Finally, the state budget is in shambled, how the hell is this going to be paid for? He preaches no new taxes, but all he has done is continue to dig our state further and further in a hole.
He can talk state rights all he wants, but all he continues to do is slash state program because of lack of funds.
Rudy Gonzales
The extremes of the radical right totally floor me! This is what happens when radical extreme's take over a party, local, state and now national political policies. No one has the right to get between a woman and her doctor. No one on earth should have the power to force their beliefs onto another for any reason. And that is what has happened to the TEA-GOP-Republican parties. Wake up America! Vote out all the extremes locally, at the state level and nationally. Get involved. Get out and vote. Get out the vote!
Bambi Clark via Texas Tribune on Facebook
The right loves to toss out the word "Liberal" because the propaganda machine has convinced them it is so vile. By watching the actions of conservative candidates I wonder how theword "conservative" will be viewed when this primary season is all over?
Dale Curry
I have found the Tribune is for the most part, largely non-partisan. Unfortunately, this article was clearly NOT up to those standards. If I have read any of Ms. Ramshaw’s ‘reporting’ before, I was unaware. Is she new? I find her reporting somewhat partisan:
1. Note the following quote form the article, “After the political firestorm of the last few weeks, the debate over the Women’s Health Program has shifted — and it’s advantage, Perry. No longer can his opponents argue he’d rather eliminate health care for more than 100,000 poor women than allow Planned Parenthood clinics to participate in the program.” This is a patently false assertion. First, while there are other organizations that can provide many if not all the services, they are not evenly distributed across the state. Secondly, many are not interested and/or do not have the resources to devote to this endeavor. It is ludicrous to believe that the 45%, approximately 45,000 patients can be absorbed by other organizations. Third, after gutting health programs during the last session, suddenly we are to believe Perry has “found” the money necessary to cover the $30 million from the FEDs.
2. And while Ms. Ramshaw evidently believes Perry when he ‘vows’ to find the money for this program, most rational people DO NOT believe him. This “governor’ is a pathological liar, incapable of addressing our citizens in honest manner.
3. The article reference Abby Johnson as a Planned Parenthood Director. Ms. Johnson, for obvious reasons, is no longer affiliated with PP. Furthermore, a click on the link to Ms. Johnson it becomes VERY CLEAR VERY QUICKLY, which Ms. Johnsons stands in opposition to abortion and a santorum supporter. The fact that Ms. Ramshaw did not get the fact as to Ms. Johnson’s affiliation speaks volumes as to the bias nature of this article
4. Ms. Ramshaw identifies CPPP as “liberal”, yet I have never seen the TPPF as right wing or conservative. Why the double standard?
The right’s rhetoric over abortion is largely just that. For Perry and his ilk, it is less about abortion and more about using this deeply divisive subject as a wedge issue and political football. Other than devout Catholics, how can someone who professes to be Pro-Life stand in opposition to contraception. This has been one ginned up controversy by the right in the hopes of motivating the base in the face of another election that is likely to leave them as road kill on a national level.
I appreciate this is a divisive issue, but the division will not be addressed as long as Propaganda masquerades as news.
Steve Jones
Texas Tribune, your interactive map contains many clinics that are no longer open because of last years budget cuts.
Yvonne Massey Davis via Texas Tribune on Facebook
Another Rick Perry lie!
Jesse R. Ayala via Texas Tribune on Facebook
She must think Texans are as stupid as her boss.
TrueTexas
Thank goodness my tax dollars will no longer fund Planned Parenthood an organization which venomously oppose! Now Texas needs to Buck-up and raise taxes to support our programs!
Kaye Moore via Texas Tribune on Facebook
The Guv is soo wrong one this...
Katie Martinez via Texas Tribune on Facebook
This article has a weird slant and lede which, if you didn't already know what was going on, might lead you to believe the crisis is the federal government's fault and Rick Perry is a champion of women's health.
Pamela Baggett-Wallis via Texas Tribune on Facebook
Seriously? Do you expect us to believe Perry caved last night without knowing he had stepped over the edge?
Sonora Hartley via Texas Tribune on Facebook
She had the notice with her in an envelope but Rick didn't show at the airport to welcome her to Texas so he didn't get it. She prob put in the mail in Houston.
Yvonne Massey Davis via Texas Tribune on Facebook
Texas Republicans, Rick Perry and Republican Legislators already cut Women's Health Program state funding from $111 million to only $38 million during the last Legislative session. At that time, the non- partisan Legislative Budget Board estimated those cuts would lead 284,000 low income Texas women losing health screenings, birth control and wellness exam services and projected 20,500 additional births due to lost access to birth control. Now, Rick Perry plays even more politics at the expense of Texas Women’s’ healthcare by rejecting Medicaid funds for Planned Parenthood Clinic health services resulting in the potential loss of another $40 million in Federal Medicaid funding. Take time today to tell Rick Perry and Texas Republicans to stop playing politics at the expense of Texas women's health. DON'T MESS WITH TEXAS WOMEN!!
Kayla Young via Texas Tribune on Facebook
The quote up top chosen to highlight the article really makes the Texas Tribune's bias on this subject clear. This issue isn't just the Obama Administration being stubborn.The article could do a much better job at showing that.
Nicholas Taylor via Texas Tribune on Facebook
The Texas GOP has a pro-life agenda, while the Democratic administration in the White House has a pro-choice agenda. The Obama administration could have given Texas a waiver. They chose not to do so and in doing so showed that their true priority is not supporting legitimate women's health programs but to support a pro-choice agenda.
Lee Dunkelberg via Texas Tribune on Facebook
Obviously, women started the GOP's War On Women and all the state's actions against the women were preemptive strikes.
uh huh
Rusty Jackson via Texas Tribune on Facebook
It is a terrible thought to ponder what Rick Perry would do to women if he were President. Fortunately he spoke too much already.
Anya Khan
Susan, I-10 and I-35 will get you out of the state quickly. Please let us know how you new non-Texas home is.
The Obama Administration would rather kill children than let Texas women do have medical care
Cris Sleightholm
Not much difference between the radical right of the religious extremists here in America versus the extremists of the religious in the middle east ; controlling women's rights.
David Spratt
Obama and Sebelius,, the defenders of womens health. This is a prime example of, What the Government giveth , the Government can taketh away, if you do not bow down and do as they say.
So rather than provide ANY MONEY for these programs , they would withold all funds to enforce the will of Obama and his band of baby killers.
Sanger's early writings clearly reflected Malthus' influence. She writes:
Organized charity itself is the symptom of a malignant social disease. Those vast, complex, interrelated organizations aiming to control and to diminish the spread of misery and destitution and all the menacing evils that spring out of this sinisterly fertile soil, are the surest sign that our civilization has bred, is breeding and perpetuating constantly increasing numbers of defectives, delinquents and dependents.10
In another passage, she decries the burden of “human waste” on society:
It [charity] encourages the healthier and more normal sections of the world to shoulder the burden of unthinking and indiscriminate fecundity of others; which brings with it, as I think the reader must agree, a dead weight of human waste. Instead of decreasing and aiming to eliminate the stocks that are most detrimental to the future of the race and the world, it tends to render them to a menacing degree dominant [emphasis added].11
She concluded,
The most serious charge that can be brought against modern “benevolence” is that it encourages the perpetuation of defectives, delinquents and dependents. These are the most dangerous elements in the world community, the most devastating curse on human progress and expression.12
The Review printed an excerpt of an address Sanger gave in 1926. In it she said:
It now remains for the U.S. government to set a sensible example to the world by offering a bonus or yearly pension to all obviously unfit parents who allow themselves to be sterilized by harmless and scientific means. In this way the moron and the diseased would have no posterity to inherit their unhappy condition. The number of the feeble-minded would decrease and a heavy burden would be lifted from the shoulders of the fit.13
Sanger said a “bonus” would be “wise and profitable” and “the salvation of American civilization.”14 She presented her ideas to Mr. C. Harold Smith (of the New York Evening World) on “the welfare committee” in New York City. She said, “people must be helped to help themselves.” Any plan or program that would make them “dependent upon doles and charities” is “paternalistic” and would not be “of any permanent value.” She included an essay (what she called a “program of public welfare,”) entitled “We Must Breed a Race of Thoroughbreds.”15
In it she argued that birth control clinics, or bureaus, should be established “in which men and women will be taught the science of parenthood and the science of breeding.” For this was the way “to breed out of the race the scourges of transmissible disease, mental defect, poverty, lawlessness, crime ... since these classes would be decreasing in number instead of breeding like weeds [emphasis added].”16
Her program called for women to receive birth control advice in various situations, including where:
the woman or man had a “transmissible” disease such as insanity, feeble-mindedness, epilepsy, syphilis, etc.;
the children already born were “subnormal or feeble-minded”;
the father's wages were “inadequate ... to provide for more children.”
Sanger said “such a plan would ... reduce the birthrate among the diseased, the sickly, the poverty stricken and anti-social classes, elements unable to provide for themselves, and the burden of which we are all forced to carry.”17
Sanger had openly embraced Malthusian eugenics, and it shaped her actions in the ensuing years.
And so it continues, the carrot and the stick attitude of the Government who has now taken over the " business" of birth control and abortion. Seems like the mantra continues to be that this is somehow " helping the poor." Looks to be that the poor, disadvantaged, underprivilaged are still the target of PP after all these years.
tom brown
The feds have every right and obligation to not renew the WHP funding for TX. As onerous as it is, the action was prompted by the State's deliberate violation of federal law. As law-breakers TX dared the feds to enforce the federal law, even tho it meant the risk of denying legitimate health care to thousands of needy and worthy recipients. Such is the attitude of hard-line religious zealots, much like the Taliban and such, who are willing to reprerss their own people in the name of dogma. Sorry ladies.
Angel Abitua
I have some funny questions. With the Obama Administration telling us how to run our health programs in Texas, why do we need a Texas Department of Health? Why do we need a state legislature assuming their responsibility to adopt a state budget? Why do we need a Governor involved in policy for health issues, or for education issues, or for any issues? Why do we need a state government? Why don’t we just run the affairs of our state through Washington, D.C. They know best.
Ron Ein via Texas Tribune on Facebook
Nicholas Taylor makes a curious assertion, that there is a difference between support for women's health care and support for comprehensive women's health care, i.e. Pro-choice. Yes, the pro-choice "agenda" is to support the full range of medically accepted ob-gyn services for all women, regardless of ability to pay. What he and his anti-choice friends advocate is something far less: limited services with government intrusion into the patient-physician relationship, even to the extent of protecting doctors who choose to supply false information or who withhold information thus violating medical standards for informed consent. Patients are in charge of this idea, not doctors and certainly not the state of Texas.
Sara Speights
The federal law requiring that all qualified providers be allowed to participate in federally funded health care programs has been the law for about 50 years. Perry and the Republicans never complained about it before. More importantly, they aren't even violating the law equally. They are not prohibiting physicians who perform abortions from treating Medicaid patients or patients in other federally-funded programs. They only went after that female-run group......Planned Parenthood.
Jimi Foster via Texas Tribune on Facebook
It's interesting that articles like this lead to discussion about how "Republicans" are hurting women and how women are taking a hit at the expense of politics yet most involved forget that they women are responsible for their own predicament in the first place and that they are in that predicament at the expense of the tax payer.
This mentality that people have the right to whatever they want with no consequences and if they can't afford the results, everyone else should pay, is stupid. You don't get to get out of a ticket for speeding because you can't afford to pay it.
And I'm sorry, Yvonne. The idea that there would be an additional (projected) 20,500 births because of lack of tax-payer funded birth control is fallacious and retarded. Sex is not a right, it's a privilege. If you can't afford a child, don't have one. If you can't afford birth control, stop screwing. Simple as that.
RICHARD PRICE
These are causality's of the war on drugs. Billions put into Homeland security to fund law enforcement., as well as hundreds of millions more in grants. The worst case of over-funding in the history of the world. All other programs will be cut with the health care dollars being used to build State and Federal prisons to lock up non-violent prisoners, and to hire more police. These politicians would take medicine or food from their own children to use for political gain. These are the low-life's you are voting for. The most vile and misconceived creatures on earth hide under the rock they call law.
Viv Arney
Somebody needs to remind Perry that he can't have it both ways. He did the same thing a few months ago - yelling about wanting to secede, then whining that the Feds wouldn't give him $$ for disaster relief. "Big government is bad - until we want to cash in." just ain't gonna work, pretty boy. I realize this is bad news for women, but remember who is causing it when you vote in November. The GOP are the ones wanting to end all "entitlement" and healthcare programs with their Scrooge mentality. Pity it's the low income populace who are going to pay the price for their greed.
Peggy Venable
Nope, Vicki -- Liberal is a fitting adjective for CPPP.
And Gov. Perry made the right decision for Texas. Obama and his Administration are trampling 10th Amendment rights, and if the states fail to take a stand, those rights will evaporate.
JC DemocratofTejas
Perry is not concerned with women's health. He just can't stop his grandstanding although obviously no one cares what he thinks. I have never seen any lowlife politician worse than rick. Forces ultrasound, forces innoculations yet claims his concern for women's healthcare. Big news perry, Planned Parenthood doesn't need your funding. Remember it made $6 million in the same amount of days when your cronie friends from Dallas turned on Planned Parenthood. Just stay out of women's affairs. And their high heels if you can!
Leslie Ferrante
I would only hope ALL WOMEN from Texas would stand up AGAINST any law that prevents women from all rights!
Leslie Ferrante
It is refreshing to read some of these posts which support women's rights! I'm from CA and I am constantly hearing comments of how narrow-minded and brainwashed most Texas women are by the hateful right agenda, against women. YOU GO TEXAS WOMEN!!!!! P.S. We need to support each other! MY MOTTO: THINK FOR YOURSELF!!!