Thousands of Low-Income Women Aren't Getting Cancer Screenings or Birth Control

[TexasTowelie]

Photo: Francisco Montes
[font color=green]Note: That isn't a longhorn on the sign.[/font]

A new state report confirms what basically everyone who wasn't a die-hard anti-abortion activist or politician predicted a couple of years ago when Texas lawmakers kicked Planned Parenthood out of its widely successful program for giving uninsured, low-income women cancer screenings and birth control.

According to new numbers out of the state Health and Human Services Commission, critics that said the program would serve a lot less women if it shunned Planned Parenthood's family planning clinics (meaning even more women across the state won't get life-saving breast and cervical cancer screenings or birth control) were dead-on right.

HHCS's numbers show that in 2011 more than 200,000 women were enrolled in the state's original Women's Health Program, a Medicaid waiver program that was 90 percent paid for by the feds. But the program got caught in the crossfire as the ideological battle over abortion rights raged in the Lege. Conservatives, indignant that Planned Parenthood's family planning clinics (which don't provide abortions) got state money under WHP, changed the law so that "affiliates" of abortion providers (re: Planned Parenthood) would be banned from the program.

A couple problems with that. First, Planned Parenthood was in fact the dominant provider in the program at the time, serving somewhere around 40 percent of WHP clients. Women's health advocates across the state urged lawmakers to reconsider, fearing existing healthcare providers wouldn't be able to absorb the clients orphaned by the state's Planned Parenthood ban.

Read more: http://blogs.houstonpress.com/news/2015/03/fewer_low-income_women_are_getting_cancer_screenings_and_birth_control_since_texas_gave_planned_pare.php