Oh, sweet irony of ironies, when one ill-thought left-wing policy ends up kicking another ill-thought left-wing policy straight in the donkey teeth.
According to local reports, no less than six Planned Parenthoods across four Western states are planning to close their doors thanks to financial woes brought on by former President Barack Obama’s Affordable Care Act.
The story goes something like this: back in the good old pre-Obamacare days, most patients who wanted to get their health care at Planned Parenthood would pay for services out-of-pocket. Post-Obamacare, many of those same patients, often low-income women, were now covered by the newly-expanded Medicare program. This means that not only could women now get their birth control, pap smears and breast exams (of which Planned Parenthood performs painfully few, already) at slews of other clinics, but the nation's largest abortion provider would now be forced to bill Medicaid for the services they used to charge straight to the patient.
And Medicaid, many Planned Parenthoods painfully discovered, reimburses clinics at a much lower rate, as crappy big-government programs tend to do.
“[Patients] would come in and get a pap smear and pay out of pocket,” Planned Parenthood spokesperson Whitney Phillips told the Denver Post. “Under the ACA, a lot of patients were given the opportunity to be on Medicaid. Again, that’s wonderful, but it meant that rather than bill them directly, we had to bill Medicaid. And Medicaid reimburses at a very low rate.”
Thanks to declining profits, along with patients’ newfound ability to obtain services at other non-Planned Parenthood clinics that also accept Medicaid, six of the abortion giant’s locations in Colorado, New Mexico, Arizona and Wyoming say they’re shutting down.
“In a shifting health care landscape nationally and in the states we serve, Planned Parenthood of the Rocky Mountains’ board and senior staff continually assess its operations in order to provide a long-term, sustainable strategy for delivering the best possible services to the people who rely on us for health care, education, and advocacy," Planned Parenthood said in a statement, according to CBS Denver.
But wait – what about Planned Parenthood’s desperate claims that forcing even one of their clinics to close will deprive countless poor women from obtaining life-saving health care services? Services that will otherwise cause them to keel over dead from cancer or the emotional weight of unwanted babies?
I guess that only applies if a clinic closes thanks to safety regulations passed by dirty rotten, Bible-thumping conservatives and not, you know, havoc-wreaking liberal health care laws.