I wish I could say I was surprised, but it is par for the course these days. Apparently PP has a right to be funded by the taxpayers. The judge didn’t put it that way, of course. An Obama appointee, Judge Tanya Walton Pratt, ruled that Indiana’s refusal to pay $ to Medicaid providers that also perform abortion interferes with Medicaid recipients rights to choose their own health care providers. From the W. Post story:
A recent federal Medicaid bulletin said states may not exclude qualified health care providers merely because they also provide abortions. Pratt noted in her ruling that the federal government had threatened to withhold some or all of Indiana’s Medicaid funds because of the new law, which could total more than $5 billion annually and affect nearly 1 million residents. “Thus, denying the injunction could pit the federal government against the State of Indiana in a high-stakes political impasse,” the judge wrote in her ruling. “And if dogma trumps pragmatism and neither side budges, Indiana’s most vulnerable citizens could end up paying the price as the collateral damage of a partisan battle.”
So, she chose which side’s “dogma” should prevail.
The primary legal issues are federal preemption and federalism’s division of sovereign powers–which seem to flow both ways depending on the politics of the issue. But let’s get real: This whole fracas would disappear if PP erected a financial and administrative wall separating its non abortion related health care services and its abortion activities. It won’t do that because money is fungible. So, even though Medicaid and federal grants are not supposed to fund abortion, money for that purpose comes in through the back door.
Which is precisely the reason organizations such as the ACLU fight so hard to force taxpayers to “keep” PP. It isn’t the “breast exams” or “PAP smears.” It isn’t the STD tests. Those could be done in most clinics and medical offices. The point is to keep the abortions churning.
—
On a different note, Judge Pratt refused to enjoin the law’s requirement that women seeking abortion be told that they are carrying a living human organism:
Pratt denied Planned Parenthood’s request to block the measure requiring doctors to tell women seeking abortions that “human physical life begins when a human ovum is fertilized by a human sperm.” “The inclusion of the biology-based word ‘physical’ is significant, narrowing this statement to biological characteristics,” she wrote in her ruling. “When the statement is read as a whole, it does not require a physician to address whether the embryo or fetus is a ‘human life’ in the metaphysical sense.”
Agree or disagree with abortion, that is the scientific truth. A pregnancy termination destroys a biologically human life.
June 26th, 2011 | 4:39 pm
Unsuprising, but others states are having success using other methods. If abortion really, truly was about “choice,” then prolife citizens shouldn’t be forced into maintaining the organization primarily responsible for fighting prolife laws and the largest promoter of abortion in the country, not to mention the largest provider as well. Heck, they spend $50 million on legal and legislative action every year. Their president was recently installed on the Ford Foundation board; I think they can handle themselves anyway.
June 26th, 2011 | 7:41 pm
When I go to a doctor, I want his medical opinion not his religious or metaphysical convictions.
Wesley J. Smith Reply:
June 27th, 2011 at 12:53 am
Irrelevant to this post.
Austin Hesse Reply:
June 27th, 2011 at 9:32 pm
@Wesley J. Smith, No it is completely relevant. You are asking a medical professional to render a religious/metaphysical opinion. That’s neither his job nor his specialty.
Wesley J. Smith Reply:
June 27th, 2011 at 11:06 pm
No, it wasn’t about that. It was about taxpayers not paying for terminations. And, it was about doctors telling women biological facts, not metaphysical beliefs. Indeed, the judge so ruled.
pentamom Reply:
June 27th, 2011 at 11:10 am
@Austin Hesse, So you’d be fine with a doctor who prescribed poison because he mistakenly believed that “people with your condition ought to just die anyway” was a medical opinion? Rather like the medical opinion of OB/GYN doctors who recommend abortion for major birth defects?
The two just aren’t that easily separated.
Austin Hesse Reply:
June 27th, 2011 at 9:12 pm
@pentamom, Your comparison is bizarre and illogical.
If I go to a doctor for a vasectomy I don’t want him telling me that he believes that I need to have children. This issue has come up with pharmacies. Customers have gone in to get birth control pills or morning after pills just to be refused or have pharmacist give them a lecture how these items go against their beliefs. If they have problems with providing these they need to get another job. That’s like ordering a hamburger at a restaurant and the waiter telling you he’s a vegetarian and shouldn’t have to serve you.
Wesley J. Smith Reply:
June 27th, 2011 at 11:08 pm
Austin. Again, irrelevant. If a woman goes for an abortion, she must be told the life within her is a human organism. That is known as informed consent.
Austin Hesse Reply:
June 28th, 2011 at 12:54 am
@Wesley J. Smith, You are mixing up biology and ideology. You can say that a fetus is human in a biological sense and is living tissue, but at what point in its development someone considers it human, a complete person is based on your own beliefs.
Wesley J. Smith Reply:
June 28th, 2011 at 2:46 am
Irrelevant to the court’s ruling and the law. The woman is told the biological truth. She decides whether that matters morally.
HistoryWriter Reply:
June 28th, 2011 at 11:03 am
@Wesley J. Smith,
Oh, c’mon Wesley; she didn’t think she was going to have a watermelon, did she? The purpose of anti-choice “informed consent” laws is to bring psychological pressure on the woman to change her mind. You know it, I know it, and so does everybody else. So please stop insulting people’s intelligence by suggesting that without those laws in place she wouldn’t be able to give “informed consent” or wouldn’t know what she was carrying. It just doesn’t work.
HW
Peaseblossom Reply:
June 29th, 2011 at 11:58 am
@HistoryWriter,
Exactly. A woman, unless she is mentally disabled, knows what she has in her womb. Why should a doctor tell her something she already knows, unless there are ulterior motives? It is yet another attempt to promote feelings of guilt. When a woman walks into an abortion clinic, she knows why she is there. It’s redundant and insulting.
Doctors are scientists not theologians or moralists. I prefer professionalism and facts. I tell you this. My first pap smear was done by a totally judgmental, 75-year old man who talked to me about Jesus while he was tinkering with my genitals. It was the most disgusting and mortifying moment of my life. Keep your God out of my underwear.
I totally agree that providers should not be excluded just because they perform abortions. There is no reason for this. Apparently you are unfamiliar with the medical insurance world, especially the Medicare/Medicaid guidelines. Fraud will definitely get you excluded from government-backed insurance programs. And they keep a close eye on coding and medical necessity. They will not pay for anything that is not medically necessary. AND if an office is audited, they can be fined hundreds of thousands of dollars, as well as permanent exclusion from Medicare/Medicaid. Jailtime can be included in the punishment. It’s more serious that you think. You have to file a claim with a certain procedure code to get paid. They are not going to pay for an abortion, don’t be stupid.
June 27th, 2011 | 12:18 am
[...] First Things (blog) [...]
June 27th, 2011 | 1:35 am
Unfortunately, right now insurers do cherry pick in a way that I think should be illegal. Insurance should not be about risk management, where companies use computer models to slice and dice their customer base into smaller and smaller segments to exclude more and more people. That’s not a legit way that health insurance should be sold, only solution for precondition is being “Penny Health”
June 27th, 2011 | 6:23 am
“A pregnancy termination destroys a biologically human life.”
So does warfare. Quick! Let’s de-fund the Department of Defense!
HW
JustChris Reply:
June 27th, 2011 at 4:05 pm
@HistoryWriter, HW, if you can’t tell the difference between war, self-defense and abortion, then you should know that the number of abortions in a single year (1.2 million) is just about the same number of US soldiers that have died in combat in every conflict, 1775-2011. Even if you include every civilian and soldier in opposing nations that died from American weapons, the numbers won’t possibly even begin to compare to the 50+ million abortions since 1973.
So if you really cared about the value of human life and the universal right to life, you’d turn your attention to where it would do the most good and join us instead of apologizing for those making millions of dollars on the backs of the most vulnerable and oppressed people of all time.
HistoryWriter Reply:
June 28th, 2011 at 7:44 am
@JustChris,
You miss the point completely. The logic is identical in both cases: it goes: “if we disagree with it on ideological grounds, we should be able to withhold our tax dollars. Better yet, it should be totally defunded and made unavailable to all.” Are you so wrapped up in your ideology that you can’t see that there’s no difference at all?
What would your reaction be to legislation that totally defunded abstinence training because it offended people who think having sex is great recreation for everybody?
HW
June 27th, 2011 | 9:10 am
BHO and Berwick are willing to stop medicaid funding for all of Indiana if they don’t fund Planned Parenthood. That speaks for itself.
HistoryWriter Reply:
June 28th, 2011 at 7:47 am
@Don Nelson,
What are you complaining about? I thought conservatives didn’t like Medicaid.
HW
pentamom Reply:
June 29th, 2011 at 4:19 pm
@HistoryWriter, Whether I like it or not is irrelevant — apparently the Feds care even less about whether the poor get healthcare than Indiana, because, you know, it’s only PP that it’s getting defunded, and every other provider of low income services will still be there. But if you take away Medicaid, actual people lose actual ability to access services, not just at one provider, but everywhere.
HistoryWriter Reply:
June 29th, 2011 at 5:44 pm
@pentamom,
Tough, isn’t it?
pentamom Reply:
July 4th, 2011 at 3:43 pm
@HistoryWriter, I see, so in the name of protecting, not access to health care for poor women, but Planned Parenthood itself, you’re willing to deny men, women and children access to healthcare and that’s “tough?”
HistoryWriter Reply:
July 5th, 2011 at 12:39 am
@pentamom,
That’s right. It’s time we separated sectarian religious ideology from medicine. If we can’t have a system that functions without it, then I don’t want ANY of my tax dollars going there at all.
HW
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