Texas' Medicaid Waiver is a Ploy to Pay Even Less for Women's Health
In its crusade against Planned Parenthood, Texas has slashed funding for family planning providers, shuttered health clinics and declined millions of federal dollars for women’s health over the last seven years. The collateral damage: tens of thousands of poor women who lost access to health services such as contraception and cancer screenings.
Now the state is pledging to expand health care access through a controversial waiver request to the Trump administration. The waiver would restore federal Medicaid funds that Texas lost when it banned Planned Parenthood from its low-income women’s health program in 2013. The program, now called Healthy Texas Women, could use help: The number of people accessing services dropped by about 40,000 from 2011 to 2016. But rather than use the federal money to add to current state funds allocated to the program, Texas wants the feds to pick up most of the tab while providing the same level of funding and services.
Texas’ waiver asks the federal government to cover about $56 million of the estimated $71 million that the program will cost in 2019. If the waiver is approved, the state will be on the hook for only about one-fifth of the total cost for the next five years. Since 2017, Texas has appropriated $85 million per year to the program, according to the state health commission, which says final numbers won’t be determined until negotiations are finished, but maintains the waiver will not decrease funds. “There will be level funding for women’s health, given the state’s commitment to it,” Health and Human Services Commission spokesperson Carrie Williams wrote in an email.
But Texas officials are framing the request as an opportunity to increase health care access, in a program that has seen dramatic drops in clients served as a result of state actions. “Granting the waiver would reinstate millions of dollars that would go directly to funding women’s health in Texas,” while advancing a “culture of life” by keeping out abortion providers and their “affiliates,” Governor Greg Abbott wrote in a letter to President Donald Trump last month. “With these federal funds, Texas women will have access to critical screening and treatment for hypertension, diabetes and high cholesterol, which are leading contributors to maternal deaths in our state.”
Read more: https://www.texasobserver.org/texas-medicaid-waiver-ploy-to-pay-less-for-womens-health/
= new reply since forum marked as read
