I consider that number nominal (from the government side, not the vendor side) and am aware of why Planned Parenthood is consistently targeted (because the right needs boogie men, even if they have to make up things about them), but was mainly questioning the cutting of abortion funding. While I am of the belief that abortion should be fully funded (and Planned Parenthood should get a shit ton of it for that purpose), it hasn’t been for a while as far as I know.
I mainly wanted to point out that government funding of Planned Parenthood has nothing to do with abortion, as that misunderstanding is why they get cuts like this in the first place.
You’re not wrong, but it seems like what this bill represents is a shift from “the Federal government will not provide funding for abortions,” to “the Federal government will not provide any funding to Planned Parenthood, because they provide abortions.”
Sure, but you ask any MAGA rat and they’ll tell you that Biden sent money to PP for abortions. We (the board) should know better, so I’m sticking to the point here. Planned Parenthood has not received a dime for abortions in many years and Trump isn’t cutting abortion funding because there wasn’t any to cut.
You can be appalled at the reductions in funding (I certainly am), but don’t mention abortions.
Money is fungible. If Planned Parenthood gets $700M for women’s health services from the government (not to be used for abortion services) and then they get $1.4B from fees for services and donations (assuming the 1/3 part is correct), They have a total of $2.1B to provide all services, including abortions. Losing that $700M is a big deal, even if they weren’t allowed to use those specific dollars for abortion services.
This bill is specifically worded to only remove funding from PP (it only applies to providers that receive more than $700M of government funding and provide abortion services).
It’s hard to see how PP will survive, absent big cut in number of facilities or some huge influx of funding from another source.
What Trump and the GOP is doing is exactly what I called out in my early post - hurting people that the MAGA movement wants to see hurt. In this case, poor women who are seeking services from a provider that also provides abortion services. If PP has to close a bunch of clinics that will be see by them as a win, regardless of how many women are hurt.
My ONLY concern here is that people confuse federal funding of Planned Parenthood with federal funding of abortions. It’s NOT happening (and is pretty tightly controlled unless you want to claim that PP is fraudulently submitting Medicaid claims for abortions under some other code or misusing federal grants for family planning services), and continuing to make arguments around this is one of the reasons that they remain a target of the right. Stop helping.
Any one that’s been following along for the last couple of decades knows that the conservative desire to shut Planned Parenthood completely is a desire in search of an opportunity lacking a justification.
The back-and-forth about Planned Parenthood and the factuality of it’s Abortion funding is getting to be a hijack. I am asking that if you wish to continue to define PP’s role in society you spin off your own thread to do so. I think we have addressed the changes to PP funding based on OBBBA sufficiently, and if someone has information on which specific figures are targeting PP via OBBBA, that’s still fair game.
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Trump really doesn’t matter in the long term. The Project 2025 assholes have taken control of the government. They have their people in positions of authority in every agency. They own the GOP. They are the ones who wrote this bill. Trump has no idea what’s in it and doesn’t care. He is the face of the MAGA movement but when he is dead, these people will still be in charge and will just install someone else to be their figurehead. America-Style Fascism won’t end when Trump is gone.
This is likely true but without a central and polarizing figure to circle around (and serve as a clown show to distract the American public, and more importantly the media from the strategic moves going on behind the scenes), there remains the question about ho coherent and in-control they are going to be. The Heritage Foundation fucks are mostly in lockstep with each other and have actually drafted a plan of sorts (although if you actually read it it is largely a series of grievance-fueled screeds about how non-Christians and ‘Marxists’ have taken over the country interspaced with half-drawn methods to dismantle the bureaucratic apparatus, not realizing that they actually need some of this machinery to run their new White Christian nation) but there are at least three other ideological factions vying for control which have divergent views about what their idea of the United States or whatever collection of rump states remain after it fragments. For sure, they’re not going away without a fight, but they might spend just as much time fighting with each other as with outside opposition.
The Democratic party has clearly decided their ideal strategy is to stand aside, allow Trump and his goons to self destruct, and then swoop in and triumphantly resume power. They probably justify it on the basis of the old Art of War maxim about not interrupting your enemy etc., but secretly they favor it because it doesn’t require them to take any kind of stand or position that might risk alienating anyone (or, in fact, to do much of anything at all). Witness the shambling-mummy “leaders” like Schumer, who listlessly pivots everything back to groceries and other kitchen-table issues, and otherwise dully sits on his thumb.
I personally find this strategy repellent, wrongheaded, and ultimately self-defeating.
Yeah. The message I get is that it’s kind of OK to throw millions of people off their insurance because it means he may be in the majority someday.
I mentioned this above, but it’s a really important point, so I’ll mention it again:
The tax cuts take effect right away, the benefit cuts come after the midterms. So, all of this about how this will swing the midterms seems like misplaced hope to me.
This crop of Democratic leadership is genuinely terrible at messaging and isn’t good at controlling the news cycle. They aren’t deliberately screwing up the message, and there isn’t they can do to actually stop the bill from passing.
I think it ultimately doesn’t matter, this bills passing wasn’t going to hinge on how much or little the Dems tried to oppose it, and people are ultimately going to remember how hit affects them.
I also am personally not so sure the GOP will succeed in avoiding backlash by delaying the benefit cuts. News of this is going to get around IMO.