Wednesday, February 6, 2013

The National Memo » Rick Perry’s War On Women Could Cost Texas Nearly Half A Billion Dollars

The National Memo » Rick Perry’s War On Women Could Cost Texas Nearly Half A Billion Dollars:

'via Blog this'What does that mean for female Texans?
“The costs are stark,” writes The New Republic‘s Molly Redden:
One quarter of Texas women are uninsured, and the Women’s Health Program was a reliable way to cover at least some of their needs. But by freezing Planned Parenthood out of the program last week, Texas has forced more than 50,000 of them to search for a new primary care doctor within the Women’s Health Program—and it is not at all clear that the system has the capacity to reabsorb them. Planned Parenthood accounted for about half of Women’s Health Program services last year—mostly in the form of cancer, diabetes, and STI treatment, plus high-blood-pressure screenings, contraception dispersement [sic], and annual checkups.
The loss of the federal funding is compounded by a cut of two-thirds of the funds the state had been allotting for family planning. By using those funds to balance the budget, experts estimate the cost to the state in unplanned pregnancies could be as much as $231 billion dollars –in addition to the $200 million Perry has rejected from the federal government for the privilege of punishing Planned Parenthood and the hundreds millions more he’d like turn down in Medicaid expansion.

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