What's Next for Texas' Women's Health Program?
Texas Tribune 3/14/12
What's Next for Texas' Women's Health Program?
A state rule that forces Planned Parenthood out of Texas' Women's Health Program takes effect today, and in response, the Obama administration is preparing to halt federal funding for the program. But the change won't be immediate: Texas health officials say it will take a few weeks to transition to a fully state-run program from one that had been 90-percent funded by the federal government.
Since the standoff between Texas and the federal government erupted over the state's decision to write clinics "affiliated" with abortion providers out of the Women's Health Program, abortion opponents have argued that there are thousands of more comprehensive health care providers available to take Planned Parenthood's place. By law, none of the clinics enrolled in the five-year-old program were performing abortions.
But Fran Hagerty, the head of the Women's Health and Family Planning Association of Texas — which represents non-Planned Parenthood providers in Texas, including clinics, hospitals and medical schools — said she seriously doubts Gov. Rick Perry will be able to keep the pledge he made last week to maintain the roughly $30 million-per-year program without federal help. She said the "monstrous" family-planning funding cuts of the last legislative session, made before the Women's Health Program was jeopardized, have eroded trust and have forced clinics to shut their doors.
"The funds made available to family planning providers through the Women’s Health Program is what is keeping most of them going at this point," she said in a statement. "No one trusts Gov. Perry to find state money to fund them at the same level as the Medicaid program."
No one trusts Gov. Perry to find state money to fund them
But that was the whole point in declaring a war on women. Cut off their access to health care.
= new reply since forum marked as read
Burnt Orange Report 3/15/12
Rick Perry to Fund Women's Health Program By Slashing Health & Human Services
by: Katherine Haenschen
Thu Mar 15, 2012 at 01:15 PM CDT
Wondering how Rick Perry is going to find over $30 million to fund the women's health program, now that he's ended our state's $9-to-$1 federal match to fund it? Easy: he'll take the money away from other needy Texans by playing a shell game with Health and Human Services funding.
Rick Perry told Empower Texans, a right-wing conservative organization, that he will divert money from other health and human services programs to fund the Women's Health Program. On a statewide conference call with the group, Perry stated:
"There's absolutely no reason to go into the Rainy Day Fund. There's no reason to raise taxes. What we'll do is we'll go back into the programs that are at Health & Human Services. We'll make prioritizations about what is important... we'll find savings in the programs that are there."
Asshole!
Or he is willing to prioritize his killing. I mean there are certainly more vulnerable people out there that will hurt even more, but they aren't in the media right now. He's just playing a shell game basically. At least until the media focus is off of him.
I doubt we saved any money, or that we continue to save any money in that program they screwed up. What happened was a fiasco and Texas paid the price. Both in human cost and in expenses.
The only people that made money - was the company they overpaid and continue to overpay even now. Just so they could "privatize" the program.
They'll do the same with this eventually. Just to get it off their responsibility and to have some other company basically drive it into the ground.
In his latest legal action against the federal government, Attorney General Greg Abbott on Friday filed a lawsuit seeking to stop the Obama administration from ending federal funding of a key Texas health program for low-income women.
The lawsuit alleges that the Department of Health and Human Services' decision, made after Texas excluded clinics affiliated with abortion providers from the Medicaid program, is capricious and interferes with the state's ability to promote women's health.
“Surely a Women's Health Program that withholds taxpayer subsidies from Planned Parenthood does more to ‘promote the objectives of Medicaid' than a state in which the Women's Health Program does not exist at all,” Abbott wrote in the suit.
The suit was filed a day after the director of Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services formally notified the state it will phase out the Medicaid Women's Health program. The agency's director said Texas' decision to deny Planned Parenthood from participating left it no other choice.
Read more: http://www.mysanantonio.com/news/local_news/article/Texas-files-suit-over-loss-of-funds-3414262.php#ixzz1pPWgotyC
Thanks to AG Abbott for wasting taxpayer's money again.
What both perry and abbott are doing is trying to shift the blame for their incompetence to Obama and the feds. That's their talking point.
Sadly, this is just the type of foolishness which resonates with their base in the state. Anything their voters can use to pretend it's anyone's fault with a D behind their name is fine by them.
