http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/07/us/li ... twitter&ad&
Yes, ideology and buzzword driven policy. "Planned Parenthood is evil and we must do everything we can to stop Satan's abortion factories!!" But what happens when ideology doesn't match reality? With conservatives, they tend to just deny reality.When [Texas] state lawmakers passed a two-year budget in 2011 that moved $73 million from family planning services to other programs, the goal was largely political: halt the flow of taxpayer dollars to Planned Parenthood clinics.
Gee, really? Who could have guessed that cutting funding to clinics that provide family planning services to mostly poor women would result in increased births and overall costs? Oh wait...there was no need to guess...The latest Health and Human Services Commission projections being circulated among Texas lawmakers indicate that during the 2014-15 biennium, poor women will deliver an estimated 23,760 more babies than they would have, as a result of their reduced access to state-subsidized birth control. The additional cost to taxpayers is expected to be as much as $273 million — $103 million to $108 million to the state’s general revenue budget alone — and the bulk of it is the cost of caring for those infants under Medicaid.
So they were told what would happen, cut family planning funding anyways, and are now acting all surprised at the outcome? Idiots, pure and simple. And they still haven't learned a damned thing...The health agency’s numbers, while alarming to some state lawmakers, are not unexpected. Last legislative session, while lawmakers debated the cuts, the nonpartisan Legislative Budget Board estimated that they would lead 284,000 women to lose family planning services, resulting in 20,000 additional unplanned births at a cost to taxpayers of $231 million. The cuts passed anyway, a price that socially conservative legislators were willing to pay in their referendum on Planned Parenthood.
Fucking ideology-driven, reality-denying, theocratic morons. That's your Republican party folks.Any such agreement would almost certainly exclude Planned Parenthood from future financing. Though the Planned Parenthood clinics that used to provide state-subsidized care never performed abortions, Republican lawmakers are enforcing rules in the state’s family planning programs that ban providers “affiliated” with clinics that perform abortions. (By this logic, because some Planned Parenthood clinics provide abortions, none of them can receive state money.)
