- Nov 26, 2011
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If all the health services are covered, then why does PP need money from the government?I disagree....for several reasons....although your argument seems logical, I don't think it quite works that way.If you need ten dollars for food and cigarettes, and you only have five dollars, you are going to have to go without one or the other. Probably cigarettes, since food is a necessity. It depends how powerful your addiction toabortionscigarettes is.
If I give you five dollars and say, "You can only spend this onwomen's health servicesfood", you now have ten dollars (your five dollars and the five dollars I gave you) and are able to buy food AND cigarettes.
So my five dollars, even though earmarked for food, helped you buy cigarettes.
Just so with federal funding of Planned Parenthood. It enables them to perform abortions.
Money is fungible.
If I "defunded" you and took my five dollars back, you would get this fungibility principle the moment your nicotine withdrawals kicked in and you had to decide between buying food or cigarettes. You could no longer buy both.
Take away PP's federal funding, and they will have to decide between abortions and women's health services.
Planned Parenthod gets money two ways from the Federal Government.
The absolute largest amount of money they get, is from MEDICAID patients who receive medical care and procedures like pap smears and breast exams or prenatal care among many other medical procedures that MEDICAID is authorized to pay for....
So, most ALL of planned parenthood federal money comes from reimbursement for people on MEDICAID.... if these patients went to a private gyno's office, the private doctor would be reimbursed the exact same amount of money as planned parenthood got for the same reimbursable procedures.
This has absolutely nothing to do with abortions, even though the gynocologist may also do abortions in his office as a private doctor, you are not calling for his reimbursement for MEDICAID patient charges to be stopped, are you?
Second, the other money that some planned parenthood gets is from Title grant, that is mandatory for every State to have....that provides rubbers and birth control pills to the very poorest..... many planned parenthood clinics are NOT given funds for this, because they are not the designated clinic of the State for this......
if memory serves, New Jersey can be an example....none of their planned parenthoods get this TITLE grant money because the State of New Jersey has opened their own clinics for this purpose, and the State of New Jersey is getting the Federal grant money for this and not any of their PP clinics.
And lastly, the women who go to planned parenthood to have abortions, PAY FOR their own abortions.... it is not free and has never been free...
Some of the women have insurance that covers the cost as well.
And, if for any reason it is a very poor person, who can not afford to pay planned parenthood,
Planned parenthood connects them with a Charity that provides money for an abortion for the indigent or very poor if they meet the charity's criteria to qualify. No tax payer money is used or can be used and it is not tied in to medicaid reimbursement, it is all from donations of the charity, if the person can not afford to pay for the abortion from PP.
So, in the case of PP, I don't think your example fits what actually happens and how it all works...
Clearly they don't have enough money to do all the things they do. They are NOT compensated for all those services.
Therefore, the federal money is being used to pay for abortions since money is fungible.