Republicans Hate Women

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.

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.

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…

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.

Mike Pence (R-IN) and Jim Jordan (R-OH) held an anti-abortion rights teleconference Monday night. Pence’s amendment to the continuing resolution on the federal budget would strip funding from all family planning providers that offer abortion services.  Pence makes me cringe everytime he opens his mouth. At lease everyone should be able to predict his actions by now.  News article about the teleconference is here.  Additional comments from DailyKos is here.