Paul Ryan recently said in a townhall forum that women will not go without healthcare if Planned Parenthood is defunded and funds diverted to Government Health Centers, of which there are 20x the number of Planned Parenthood. My initial thought was one of relief. Planned Parenthood provided me with affordable healthcare when I was in college and currently provides my niece with healthcare she can afford and was concerned about it being defunded. If that happens, I will be sad to see it go, but at least women can still get their care. So, I searched to see what Government Health Centers were around and was roundly disappointed. It seems that opponents of Planned Parenthood are simply counting the number of total Government Health Centers, not just the ones that will provide women’s care, when comparing availability.
A Planned Parenthood is within 4 miles of my home. I searched for all Government Health Centers and received 10 locations within 15 miles of my home, but that is actually misleading. Five options provided were really just one medical care provider that offered many different services, and one was OB/Gyn services for women. So, given 5 options but really it’s just one practice. Other than that, there was a pediatric facility, podiatry, dentist, an association for primary healthcare providers (does not provide medical) and a charity organization that provides no medical care, just referrals to other facilities for medical care.
So it seems that Republicans are using the broadest definition of a Government Health Center to inflate the number of providers that provide the type of health care Plan Parenthood does. I can’t find the number of Government Health Centers that actually provide women’s health services, so it could be more, but seriously, this Planned Parenthood witchhunt is getting really really lame.
Ryan also emphasized that the Government Health Centers would not be providing abortion services, even though abortions are totally legal. Apparently, they’ll only provide services and counseling that are consistent with the conservative agenda. And without the Planned Parenthood alternative, abortions will effectively be illegal.
If the current trajectory continues, I would expect contraception — in fact, anything that even hints at being related to family planning — to be added to the “we don’t do that, neither” list in the not-too-distant future.
PP isn’t just for women anyway. I get annual STD tests from them and they do other men’s health services as well. It would suck for everyone if they get the boot.
It seems like if the Republicans were for free market and choice in providers, they would not be picking on Planned Parenthood.
Lots of places provide abortion services and accept Medicare as insurance. Focusing on Planned Parenthood is ridiculous. Federal do not go towards abortions. Planned Parenthood simply bills Medicare for services that it covers.
Actually, now that I think about it you may be right. But I would think that it is very age dependent. When I was in my 20s, the majority of women I know used Planned Parenthood for their health services. Being relatively poor and in good health, they did not have a doctor and were usually under-insured. This may have changed with the ACA and other societal changes.
It’s possible that I’ve been living in a cave, but this is the first I’ve heard the term Government Health Center. Huh. So I just googled it and found the HRSA website that let me search for some near me.
If they’re serious about this, they need to advertise more. I had no idea they existed, but I’ve known about Planned Parenthood for decades. (And I, too, used them when I was a poor college student.)
Ryan and his ilk are the same kind of chuckleheads who tried to say women could get reproductive health care from a dentist (hence the lack of needing Planned Parenthood to be funded).
I must have been in the cave next door. I hadn’t heard of them either. And there is a clinic a few miles from my house.
I am still trying to figure them out. Around here there is a well-known “public health agency”, which I always thought dealt with public health-not individual healthcare. If that agency is the same as a “Health Center”, it comes as a surprise to me.
My niece works for a Planned Parenthood clinic. She said her bosses are saying Planned Parenthood isn’t going away any time soon. Also to refute a common misconception, Planned Parenthood has never used any government supplied funding to provide abortion services or counseling. That is all paid for from private donations. All donors also can choose whether PP can use their donation for these services. Title X actually prevents any government funding from being used for abortions services anyway.
Fungibility makes that argument kinda silly though, if they are indeed receiving any government funding, and also offering the abortion services. “No no, we used those dollars on the waiting room chairs and the cleaning crew salaries, and different dollars on the salaries for the abortion doctors!” Money’s money, honey.
(Either way, of course I think they should keep that funding.)
They aren’t government health centers. They are non-profits who get some of their funding through federal grants. The one I went to way back when got most of its funding by serving insured patients (like any other clinic). They also get funding through donations, community grants, sliding fees.
My experience was the the care was marginal, and the wait for an appointment horrific. I was insured, but it was my neighorhood clinic. They were really well intentioned people, but really overworked, understaffed and underfunded. Planned Parenthood (which I also used back in the poor college student days) was the Mayo Clinic in comparison.
Not in the Accounts Payable world it’s not; they’ll have different account codes for different things like consumable supplies (medicine) non-consumable (furniture), staff salaries and each procedure has a code; to pay that code money gets pulled from the proper account for that code.
Money’s not all the same money, honey.
It doesn’t really matter, generally speaking. Receiving government funds allows them to provide abortions because they don’t have to divert money they receive from other sources to pay all of their administrative costs, for instance. If they lost these funds, they wouldn’t be able to provide as many abortions. Money is in fact mostly fungible, despite accountancy rules.