NYTimes | 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.
