Paging Captain Obvious–please report to the Great State of Texas (boldface mine):
When 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.
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….
“I know some of my colleagues felt like in retrospect they did not fully grasp the implications of what was done last session,” said Representative Donna Howard, Democrat of Austin, who said she had been discussing ways to restore financing with several other lawmakers in both parties.
Maybe because they’re fucking morons who don’t understand how babies are made? (I doubt it, but we’ll get that shortly). Anyway, if that didn’t bend your noodle, this will (boldface mine):
Senator Bob Deuell, Republican of Greenville, has been an advocate for getting Planned Parenthood off taxpayer financing, but he said last session’s family planning cuts had gone too far….
“I’ve debated this in Republican clubs with people — people who say it’s not the government’s role to provide family planning,” said Dr. Deuell, a primary care physician. “Ultimately, they’re right. But you have to look at what happens if we don’t.”
They’re not right. They are wrong. About 23,760 times. The goal of family planning is to prevent unwanted pregnancies. If you care about solutions, as opposed to ideological catechism, if you care about results (git ‘er done!), then it’s pretty clear there is a government role in the provision of family planning.
We keep reading about how the Republicans are clawing their way back to sanity. Until they begin to show….personal responsibility for the policies they advocate, and place consequences above bumper sticker sloganeering and sound bites, they’ll still be in the wilderness. Conservatives have erected a massive pseudo-intellectual and emotional infrastructure to prevent the intrusion of reality, and they must dismantle that before they can engage with reality (good luck with that).
This is what happens when you turns simplistic statements of how one would like the world to be into a putative philosophy of governance. And it is yet another reason why we can’t have nice things.
mikethemadbiologist
Last year I remarked to a relative that of the stories I heard coming out of Texas, at least 9 out of 10 of them were of the ‘horror’ kind, as in freaking morons/monsters saying or doing something dreadful.
From the first link:
“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.”
The Pious Pinheads don’t care about the consequences. They’re Holier Than You, and want to rub your nose in it.
But supposing some of their buddies decide that using hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars to fuel the sacred celebratory fire pits isn’t too clever, what are they going to do about it? Again from the first link:
“The question now, with Planned Parenthood largely off the table, is whether there will be the political will to restore money for birth control, which has increasingly found itself lumped with abortion in Republican debates about family planning.”
Planned Parenthood is “off the table”. Restoring PP funding would be to publicly admit they were Holy Horse’s Asses from the gitgo, so I don’t think they’ll do that.
Which got me to thinking about how can they “restore money for birth control”? Like, to whom do they give the money? Doctors? Like the poor women have the money to pay for multiple office calls, or the great state of Texas would pay for such visits. To some state agency where the poor women have to wait in line for their turn to grovel and eat dirt to get their condoms/pills/IUDs? Another winner.
No, I expect the Devout Dummies to suck it up and stick to their guns on this issue. Hope I’m wrong, but that’s not the way to bet.