Collins,
Gail
Sep 19, 2015
Planned
Parenthood! Government shutdown!
Anti-abortion politicians are in an uproar over videos that
supposedly show Planned Parenthood representatives negotiating on prices for
tissue from aborted fetuses. Carly Fiorina was passionate about the subject in
this week's Republican debate. Nothing she said was accurate, but nobody's
perfect.
The House Judiciary Committee has been investigating the
matter with lawyerly precision, starting with a hearing titled: "Planned
Parenthood Exposed: Examining the Horrific Abortion Practices at the Nation's
Largest Abortion Provider." In a further effort to offer balance and
perspective, the committee did not invite Planned Parenthood to testify.
(Coming soon: The House Committee on Energy and Commerce
prepares to welcome Pope Francis with a hearing on "Papal Fallibility: Why
He's Totally, Completely and Utterly Off Base About Global Warming.")
Planned Parenthood gets about $500 million a year from the
federal government, mainly in reimbursements for treating Medicaid patients.
Now the House Freedom Caucus, which specializes in threatening to shut down the
government, has announced that its members won't vote for any spending bill
unless the money is eliminated.
At Wednesday's debate, Jeb Bush issued a popular Republican
call for transferring the money to other "community-based
organizations" that provide women's health services. "That's the way
you do this is you improve the condition for people," he said. As only Jeb
Bush can.
You may recall that Bush made a similar suggestion earlier
in the campaign, in which he added -- to his lasting regret -- "although
I'm not sure we need half a billion dollars for women's health issues."
"I misspoke," the former governor of Florida said
later. Well, that does seem to happen a lot. But do you think it was really a
slip of the tongue? Or are there other services Planned Parenthood provides
that Bush would be happy to get rid of as well? He did once write a book that
tackled the subject of how to reduce abortions without ever mentioning the word
"contraception."
This leads us to an important question about the Planned
Parenthood debate: Are the people who want to put it out of business just
opposed to the abortions (which don't receive federal funds), or are they
against family planning, period?
"I'm telling you, it's family planning," House
Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi said in a phone interview. "They decided that
was their target long ago."
Let's look at the even larger question: Can Congress really
just move the Planned Parenthood money to other health care providers? Besides
family planning services, Planned Parenthood offers everything from breast
exams to screening for sexually transmitted infections. Many of its patients
live in poor or rural areas without a lot of other options.
Another move-the-money presidential candidate is Gov. Bobby
Jindal of Louisiana -- he's the one issuing round-the-clock insults to Donald
Trump in the desperate hope of attracting a little attention.
Jindal cut off $730,000 in Medicaid reimbursements to his
state's two Planned Parenthood clinics, even though neither offers abortion
services. They do, however, provide thousands of women with health care,
including screening for sexually transmitted infections -- a terrible problem
in some parts of the state.
No big deal. When the issue went to court, Jindal's
administration provided a list of more than 2,000 other places where Planned
Parenthood's patients could get care.
"It strikes me as extremely odd that you have a
dermatologist, an audiologist, a dentist who are billing for family planning
services," responded the judge.
Whoops. It appeared that the list-makers had overestimated a
tad, and the number of alternate providers was actually more like 29. None of
which had the capacity to take on a flood of additional patients.
When Planned Parenthood leaves town, bad things follow. Ask
the county in Indiana that drove out its clinic, which happened to be the only
place in the area that offered H.I.V. testing. That was in 2013; in March the
governor announced a "public health emergency" due to the spike in
H.I.V. cases.
Sara Rosenbaum, a professor of health law and policy at
George Washington University, studied what happened when Texas blocked Planned
Parenthood grants and tried to move the money to other providers. Even when
there were other clinics in an area, she said, "they were overbooked with
their own patients. What happened in Texas was the amount of family planning
services dropped. And the next thing that happened, of course, was that
unplanned pregnancies began to rise."
If an elected official wants to try to drive Planned
Parenthood out of business, there are two honest options: Announce that first
you're going to invest a ton of new taxpayer money in creating real
substitutes, or shrug your shoulders and tell the world that you're fine with
cutting off health services to some of your neediest constituents.
If you get heat, you can always say you misspoke.
