Republicans Hate Women

You may remember that Indiana was pulling their contributions to Planned Parenthood and that this would eliminate primary healthcare for approximately 10,000 low income women in the state. Planned Parenthood was continuing to provide services using donations to pay for them, but starting today has had to make large cutbacks in Indiana.  Rachel Maddow had a good segment on this tonight.  The Indiana action is clearly against federal medicaid laws so it may be pulled back after a judge rules, but until then, the Republicans are denying health care to its citizens.  I believe that President Obama should cut all Medicaid funding to the state of Indiana. That will hurt people, but it is also about the only way to stop these idiots from more of these actions. My understanding is that since the federal Medicaid administrator has already found this illegal, the administration could cut off funds immediately.  Every time someone calls them on their actions, the republicans back down, but they won’t back down if no one calls them. Governor Mitch Daniels makes the wall of shame for his part in this.

The state of Indiana has passed a law making changes to Indiana Medicaid, including banning funding to Planned Parenthood.  As we know, very little of what Planned Parenthood does is abortion related (3% from the Planned Parenthood 2008-9 annual report), so the effect of this change is to deny basic healthcare services to many women.  In fact, according to the Guttmacher Institute, Planned Parenthood and other family planning centers are the primary or even exclusive sources of health care for many women.

The Obama administration is pushing back. HHS sent a letter to Indiana informing them that their plan will improperly bar beneficiaries from receiving services.  Specifically, Medicaid Administrator Donald M. Berwick wrote, “Medicaid programs may not exclude qualified health care providers from providing services that are funded under the program because of a provider’s scope of practice.” If Indiana chooses to continue down this path, then the federal government could conceivable cut off all Medicaid funding to Indiana.

Obama has shown time after time that he is not willing to stand firm on any issues and is always looking to find a compromise, but my fervent desire is that he will decide to use this case to break that pattern.  I know that many people will be harmed if Medicaid is shut down temporarily in Indiana, but every time he caves in to these right wing wackoes, many other people are harmed and the wackoes are encouraged to come up with even more harmful plans.  This is a heartless numbers game of picking your stands where they do the least harm. In this particular case, Obama can stand firm against a bad idea and limit the damage to one state.  He should be able to sell it as yet another republican attack on Medicaid since that is exactly what this is. 

Indiana has 60 days to appeal, but so far they haven’t shown much interest in changing their law. We will monitor this one over the summer and update it as new changes occur.

A republican from Kansas (where else) who thinks that rape is pretty much like a flat tire. We should just plan ahead and carry a spare.  Here’s the exact quote:

DeGraaf: We do need to plan ahead, don’t we, in life?

Bollier: And so women need to plan ahead for issues that they have no control over with a pregnancy”

DeGraaf: I have spare tire on my car. I also have life insurance. I have a lot of things that I plan ahead for.

This was part of a debate on further limiting abortion rights in Kansas. If I understand it correctly, DeGraaf and his cronies want to ban insurance companies from covering any abortions. So that kind of makes his comment about having life insurance a complete load of crap.

Well the house passed H.R. 3 which pretty much shows how Republicans view women.  Good summary story on Kos is here with a link to the National Women’s Law Center who say the bill will increase costs and taxes for millions of women and businesses.  The vote was 251 to 175.  16 Democrats were among those voting yes. Here’s the rollcall if you want to see what your representative did.

The Republicans in the house are still attempting insert language that will prohibit victims of “non-forcible” rape whatever that is from receiving any federal funcing if they seek abortions.  I wrote about this earlier. Its pretty typical behavior from the slimy weasels. They tried to push through a bill that most Americans disagree with. When there was push back on that, they dropped the offensive language, but they are trying to insert the equivalent of a presidential signing statement by crafting a committee report with similar wording.  If the law is ever challenged, then the courts typically allow examination of the committee report to clarify intent.  Here’s the story courtesy of Mother Jones.

We all know that the republicans have been very busy this year attacking Women’s rights, but I didn’t realize just how busy. I seem to remember Rachel Maddow stating that they had found somewhere on the order of 300+ pending bills. Now I’ve found a report by the Guttmacher Institute that claims there have been 916 bills introduced in 49 state legislatures (the only reason its not 50 is that Louisiana hasn’t convened yet).

I don’t have any idea how accurate the report is, but there is a reasonable amount of supporting data on the website. Also, just based on the number of news reports about some of these bills we know there are a lot of them out there.  I was surprised that there are over 900 however.  Now I’m guessing that there are probably a lot of these bills introduced every year and most of them don’t have much chance of being passed. The scary thing this year is that a number of state legislatures are packed with batshit crazy right wing tea party types and every other republican is afraid of them, so some of these bills are being passed.

Here’s hoping that at least some republicans will have the courage to vote for what the majority of Americans want and expect. You wouldn’t think it would take courage to support a majority position…

At least that’s the what state Rep Eric Turner from Indiana is worried about.  Bad enough that the state is in the process of passing legislation that would shorten the time frame for most abortions from approximately 24 weeks (the time at which a fetus is considered viable) down to 20 weeks. One of Indiana’s democrats (Rep Gail Riecken) introduced an amendment to exempt women who become pregnant due to rape or incest.  Here is Turner’s response:

“With all do respect to Rep. Riecken, I understand what she’s trying to do. But as you know that when the federal health care bill was going through Congress there was a lot of discussion whether this would allow for abortion coverage and of course we were all told it would not. And the bill, my house bill 1210, would prevent that for any insurance company to provide abortion coverage under federal health care bill. This [amendment] would open that window and I would ask you to oppose this amendment.”

“I just want you to think about this, in my view, giant loophole that could be created where someone who could — now I want to be careful, I don’t want to disparage in any way someone who has gone through the experience of a rape or incest — but someone who is desirous of an abortion could simp0ly say that they’ve been raped or there’s incest.”

Here’s the video thanks to thinkprogress.org. I love the response from Rep. Linda Lawson(D).

I always worry a bit when a few days go by without any prominent postings about this or that skulduggery.  I know this week was a distraction between the multiple disasters in Japan, the multiple anti-government protester killings in the mideast and the ongoing games in Wisconsin, but just because we don’t read about it doesn’t mean the Republicans aren’t up to something.  Of course they are up to something. Here it is. Thanks to Daily Kos for the article.  Just what we need — the IRS to perform abortion audits. Read the article. They may be stuck in the same old ruts, but they have some creative minds coming up with this crap.