Texas' Health Care Grant to Anti-abortion Activists Was a Steep Price for Nothing

If there's a downside for state officials in their relentless holy war against Planned Parenthood, it's this: They have to make a pretense of making good on their promise to replace the services lost when Texas defunded the women's health organization. Confident that oh, just anybody can come up with cancer screenings, breast exams, contraceptives, and other medical care for tens of thousands of low-income women, the state slashed family planning grants and defunded all clinics that also provide abortions two years ago. The replacement program, christened Healthy Texas Women, was supposed to fill in the gap. One of the biggest contracts the state awarded under HTW last August, $1.6 million, went to the Heidi Group, a Round Rock anti-abortion organization that provides no medical services. Instead, the group promised a multi-pronged outreach program that would steer 50,000 eligible clients to several designated clinics. A big job, but state officials said enthusiastically that they had confidence in the group's "robust" proposals. An Associated Press review published this week disclosed the progress the Heidi Group has made on its major promises: None. No fresh initiative of social media outreach, no overhaul of outdated clinic websites, no public service announcements, no 1-800 hotline to help low-income women find affordable services in their communities. "The goal was to help the clinics boost their patient rolls and show there would be no gap in services if the nation's largest abortion provider had to scale back," the AP reported. "But eight months later, the Heidi Group has little to show for its work." Armed with $1.6 million taxpayer dollars, the Heidi Group has delivered nothing. Y'all, I have got to get myself some of this state contract business. I'll need to update my resume, but I'm confident I can deliver nothing as well as anybody. Throughout my life, there have been many occasions - long weekends, vacations, holiday breaks and so on - when I have accomplished nothing at all for days at a stretch. I am more than confident that I can meet any established quota in this area. I might sleep less easily, though, should my doing nothing contribute to the loss of access for thousands of women - single moms, teenagers, students, the working poor - to basic and potentially lifesaving care. Hiring providers like the Heidi Group was supposed to be Texas' model for proving to other states that it could get by just fine without the Planned Parenthood, the nation's largest, most established provider of women's reproductive health care. Some model. But then, by granting a big slice of the pie to a group that has historically done little besides agitate against abortion, perhaps they got what they paid for. The group's chief, Carol Everett, is well known as a onetime abortion clinic worker turned anti-choice evangelist. Long an advocate for steering more government funding to "crisis pregnancy centers" - counseling outfits that try to dissuade pregnant women from seeking abortion - her medical bona fides are perhaps a little suspect. Everett has said publicly that HIV is transmissible through drinking water; that Planned Parenthood purposely distributes faulty birth control pills and defective condoms in order to create more unplanned pregnancies; that Planned Parenthood promotes sex between children and animals; that having more than one sex partner is "like rape"; that sex education in public schools brainwashes children into believing they are bisexual; and that the notorious (and subsequently debunked) undercover "baby parts" videos were so shocking that they traumatized her dog. Her claims have been so bizarre, in fact, that some were stunned when Texas chose to make her a significant player in is revamped women's health program. Slate writer Mark Joseph Stern, for one, was shocked - shocked! - to see conservative ideologues throwing poor women under the bus to get their way: "It's almost as though Texas cares more about promoting anti-abortion ideology at the expense of women's safety than protecting women's health," he wrote. Well, that was August, and Texas was only the sharp edge of a blunt axe head. It's getting awfully hard to be shocked that hard-line politicians would cheat and punish low-income Americans - millions of them - in order to score political points. Everett offered a vague shopping list of excuses for the Heidi Group's inaction, blaming clinic personnel and state funding mechanisms. A state Health and Human Services spokeswoman tried to put a cheery face on all this, saying "there's a slight learning curve for everyone."Well, I don't have to learn a thing. I promise, I already know how to do nothing. Give me a grant, Texas, and I'll get started right away.  Continue reading...