Great video from ThinkProgress:
Category: National Issues
The Phony, Unprincipled War On Planned Parenthood
The following appears on the NationalMemo.com website and is by Mary Sanchez. You can find a link to the original article below.
With one careless comment, Jeb Bush revealed a fundamentally indifferent attitude toward half the U.S. electorate.
“I’m not sure we need half a billion dollars for women’s health issues,” he said in a speech at the Southern Baptist Convention in Nashville, Tennessee.
It was a throwaway aside in a longer blather about defunding Planned Parenthood, and one imagines that no sooner were the words out of his mouth than his cringing consultants were drafting a clarification.
The inevitable statement soon followed, admitting he “misspoke” and adding that “there are countless community health centers, rural clinics and other women’s health organizations that need to be fully funded.”
Too late. The game was on. Hillary Clinton blasted back, “When you attack women’s health, you attack America’s health.”
I don’t believe Bush misspoke. There’s something about abortion he wishes to ignore: Abortion is a women’s health issue. You cannot separate abortion from this context.
Oppose it or not — and I do — abortion is a medical procedure that ends an unwanted or health-threatening pregnancy. If we want to encourage the trend toward decreasing numbers of abortions in this country — and no one in their right mind wants to see more of them — we need to bolster women’s reproductive health services. That means Continue reading “The Phony, Unprincipled War On Planned Parenthood”
Health care law hasn’t dented hiring or hours, as critics predicted.
Well, looks light the fear mongering on the right was (yet again) unfounded. The following by Max Ehrenfreund of the Washington Post appeared in the August 13, 2015, StarTribune:
President Obama’s health care overhaul hasn’t meant less time on the job for workers, according to three newly published studies that challenge one of the main arguments raised by critics of the Affordable Care Act.
One provision requires businesses with more than 50 employees to offer health insurance to those working at least 30 hours a week.
Republicans, and some Democrats, worried that employers would look for ways to get around the mandate, either by giving their employees fewer than 30 hours, or by hiring fewer people.
So far, though, researchers say employers have not changed how they hire and schedule their workers.
“There really hasn’t been nearly the change that some people were expecting,” said Chris Ryan of the payroll-management firm ADP.
ADP analysts studied the payrolls of clients, about 75,000 firms and organizations. They found no overall change in employees’ weekly schedules between 2013 and 2014.
According to ADP’s analysis, scheduling shifts were trivial in every economic sector, even in industries that rely heavily on part-time work.
ADP’s findings were confirmed in another study by Aparna Mathur and Sita Nataraj Slavov of George Mason University and Michael Strain of the conservative American Enterprise Institute.
Their paper, published this month in the journal Applied Economics Letters, used data from the federal Current Population Survey and finds no statistically significant change in the proportion of part-time workers in the sectors most likely to be affected by the law.
An analysis by Bowen Garrett and Robert Kaestner of the Urban Institute reached largely the same conclusions.
Your can read the original post here.
How Planned Parenthood actually uses its federal funding
There’s been a lot of coverage of Planned Parenthood recently. (And, once again, operatives on the Right have been caught editing video to skew what someone says. So much for any kind of values.) Below is an article by Janell Ross from the Washington Post published August 4, 2015, that talks about how federal funds are used by this organization:
The long-running calls for the federal government to cease all funding directed toward Planned Parenthood have once again come to the fore. This time, a congressional vote and debate took shape after an anti-abortion group secretly recorded a series of videos with the organization’s medical officers and staff speaking dispassionately — some would say dismissively — about the work of extracting fetal tissue from aborted fetuses and and transferring it to research facilities.
And even though the defund Planned Parenthood fight on the Senate floor didn’t move the needle — in terms of actual impacts on funding — it did bring to the fore some important facts about how much federal money goes to the group, and what it’s used for.
Those federal dollars were the single largest source of money coming into the organization and its local affiliates, by far. Another $305.3 million came from nongovernment sources, about $257.4 million reached the organization after private donors and foundations made contributions and bequests. The organization also raised another $54.7 million in fees charged for its services. So, government funding — with federal dollars comprising the biggest portion of this part of the organization’s budget — are absolutely critical to Planned Parenthood’s total operation.
But, it’s important to note that federal dollars are not used to provide the service at the center of the political debate around Planned Parenthood: abortions. That’s been banned by law in almost all cases since 1976. (The details of the ban have shifted over time.) Instead, the organization uses money from other sources — private donors and foundations as well as fees — to fund its abortion services. Continue reading “How Planned Parenthood actually uses its federal funding”