The Storm Over Women's Health Care Had Been Brewing

[white cloud]

March 23, 2012

In the battle between state leaders and the Obama administration over Texas’ decision to oust health care providers affiliated with abortion clinics from a five-year-old contraception and cancer-screening program, both sides believe they are the victims.

The Obama administration says Texas is violating federal law by limiting where poor women can seek health care, and it announced last week that it was cutting off financing for the Texas Medicaid Women’s Health Program, which does not pay for abortions and received $9 in federal financing for every $1 the state contributed.

Republican elected officials, who are seeking tens of millions of dollars in the state budget to continue the program without federal help and without Planned Parenthood clinics — the focus of the state’s ire — interpret the law another way. They say it grants states the authority to decide which health providers are qualified to participate, and they are suing the federal government, claiming that its action is unconstitutional.
http://www.npr.org/local/stories/KUT/149224707

[sonias]

1. It was the Democrats that got this money for the state

And now the Rs want complete control over the federal monies to give it to their fundamental right wing nuts to squander on their faith based/abstinence only sex education that everyone knows does not work.

The origins of the Women’s Health Program can be traced to 1999, when family-planning advocates began asking lawmakers to include $40 million in the state health budget to finance contraception and well-woman exams for poor women. Despite an orchestrated push, the efforts were unsuccessful.

Two years later, state Rep. Garnet Coleman, D-Houston, and state Sen. Judith Zaffirini, D-Laredo, in conjunction with Republican lawmakers, inserted language into a comprehensive Medicaid reform bill directing state health officials to team with the federal government to start the health program. The use of Medicaid dollars for abortions — except in cases involving rape, incest or when a mother’s life was in danger — was already banned. The idea behind Texas’ program, Coleman said, was to save money for Medicaid “by expanding family-planning services to women who might get pregnant.”