Population Planners’ Bad Math

Tue, 30 Jul 2013 00:03:00 -0400

Abortion advocates and population planners eagerly promote the idea that preventing births saves money.

Population Planning Won’t Balance Budgets

Tue, 26 Mar 2013 00:03:00 -0400

As states seek to balance budgets, population planning groups are touting abortion and contraception as money-saving measures. According to their crude calculus, Medicaid-paid births to poor mothers strain the social safety net and must be reduced.

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Why Planned Parenthood Won’t Provide Mammograms

Wed, 24 Oct 2012 00:01:00 -0400

President Barack Obama, Planned Parenthood President Cecile Richards, and countless supporters have claimed again and again that Planned Parenthood provides mammograms. President Obama did so in the second presidential debate, describing the “millions of women all across the country who rely on Planned Parenthood for . . . mammograms.”

The problem is the mammogram claim is untrue, as was just cleverly highlighted by “Schedule Your Imaginary Mammogram Day,” a phone campaign that found no Planned Parenthood clinics capable of breast cancer screening. Planned Parenthood has neither the license nor the machines. The most the abortion giant has ever done is refer women to outside mammogram providers, filling the role of the Yellow Pages or Google.

Yet the claim is persistently made, despite its falsehood, in order to rebrand Planned Parenthood not as the abortion business it is, but instead as a health care provider.

Key to that health care narrative is the claim that Planned Parenthood provides substantial cancer-screening services, such as mammograms. (Apparently the pap smears Planned Parenthood really does administer are insufficient fodder for the narrative.)

Why doesn’t Planned Parenthood just offer mammograms? Doing so would do real good while saving their public defenders from credibility diminishing lies.

The answer may lie in what economists call the “contribution margin.” The contribution margin of each procedure is the marginal profit per unit of sale and thus the amount each procedure contributes to the coverage of fixed costs (such as executive compensation) and to profits.

The problem for Planned Parenthood”which thinks and acts much more like a business than most people realize”is that mammograms are much less profitable than the relatively lucrative procedure of abortion.

In his article “Mammography: Is its success threatened by low reimbursement rates?”, radiologist Dr. James Youker highlights the problem of “low reimbursement rates for mammography and the high cost of complying with the increasingly complex regulations.” A more recent article by Dr. Gillian Newstead documents the problem’s persistence:

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Population Planners’ Bad Math

Population Planning Won’t Balance Budgets

Why Planned Parenthood Won’t Provide Mammograms