Today’s Managing Health Care Costs Number is 40%
Blue Squares are counties with Planned Parenthood affiliates, red triangles are counties without Planned Parenthood affiliates. You can see dramatic and statistically significant decreases in LARC (IUDs and implants) and injectable contraception. The difference was not significant for the bottom graph (primarily birth control pills)
Last week’s New England Journal of Medicine featured a report that showed that shuttering of Planned Parenthood women’s health clinics in Texas was associated with dramatic decreases in use of long acting contraception, and startling increases in childbirth covered by Medicare.
How big are the changes?
· Women in the counties where Planned Parenthood affiliates were closed were 40% less likely to get contraceptive injections on time (57% down to 38%)
· There were over 35% fewer long acting reversible contraception claims (IUDs), and 31% fewer injectable contraceptive injections in these counties
· Women on Medicaid in counties with shuttered Planned Parenthood affiliates were 20% more likely to get pregnant (7% to 8.4%).
National Public Radio has reported that 2/3 of the shuttered clinics were not Planned Parenthood clinics. A large portion of the closed clinics provided no abortions, but only offered women’s health services. Presumably we’ll see later research showing lower rates of pap smears and mammograms as well.
These findings are hardly startling. Texas legislators and governors have been pushing legislation to reduce access not only to abortion, but also contraception. Making contraception less available means that fewer women use contraception, and more get pregnant. Most of us learned about this in middle school.
Of course.
The NEJM researchers didn’t report the increased costs associated with these additional childbirths, but the Congressional Budget Office noted last year that national prohibitions on Planned Parenthood funding would increase federal spending by $130 million over 10 years.
It’s worth noting that the legislators in Texas are pretty unhappy that state public health officials participated in this research.
Powerful Republican state Sen. Jane Nelson dismissed the findings as invalid, in part because the research was funded by the nonprofit Susan T. Buffet Foundation, which is a major supporter of Planned Parenthood and other abortion rights groups.
She also questions why two state health employees were among the study's five co-authors.
"It's one thing for an agency to provide data upon request. It's quite another to be listed as a 'co-author' on a deeply flawed and highly political report," said Nelson, an architect of Texas' current women's health program. "I've communicated strong concerns to the agency. This should not have happened, and we need to make sure it doesn't happen again."
Sounds like reproductive rights opponents are taking the climate change denial approach to the study of women’s reproductive health care. First, they deny that decreasing access to reproductive care hurts women and increases state costs. Then they threaten the researchers.
