Planned Parenthood: Broke, Losing Customers and Providing Shoddy Care

This post was originally published on this site

I was out of town last weekend when the NY Times published this story about Planned Parenthood so I missed seeing it. But despite being a few days old it’s definitely worth a mention here on the site. It’s titled “Botched Care and Tired Staff: Planned Parenthood in Crisis” which gives you a pretty good idea that this is not an upbeat story about America’s top abortion provider. 

In fact, the story opens with a botched abortion. Three months after the “abortion” supposedly took place, the woman went to an emergency room and gave birth to a baby which “quickly died.” A botched abortion at Planned Parenthood is probably brand new territory for the NY Times but they have their limits. In this case we don’t get any explanation for why she went into labor at 5 months or about 20 weeks. The implication is that the labor was brought on by something done by Planned Parenthood, but again we don’t get those details. As far as the Times is concerned, the victim here is the woman, not the baby.

It turns out this is just one out of “scores” of cases of substandard care at Planned Parenthood which the Times attributes to “aging equipment and poorly trained staff.”

In a case settled in California last year, a woman accused the organization of improperly implanting a birth control device in her arm and causing nerve damage.

A Nebraska clinician in 2022 did not realize that a woman was four months pregnant when she inserted an IUD. Several hours later, the patient was rushed to an emergency room and gave birth to a stillborn fetus…

In Omaha last year, sewage from a backed-up toilet seeped into the abortion recovery room for two days, according to interviews with staff members and photographs and text messages shared with The Times…

Salaries are so low that it is not unusual for staff members to qualify for Medicaid and federal food assistance.

Turnover is hovering at around 50 percent a year in many parts of the country, and clinic workers complained that they were learning from inexperienced peers.

The underlying problem behind all these problems is money. Planned Parenthood has fewer clinics and many fewer patients than it did in the past. Plus federal funding continues to dry up.

Patient counts have shrunk from a high of five million and 900 clinics in the 1990s to 2.1 million patients and 600 clinics today…

Clinics are primarily funded by Medicaid payments for non-abortion procedures and donors who give directly to the affiliates. But there have been sharp reductions in government reimbursements. Arkansas, Missouri and Texas have blocked Planned Parenthood clinics from receiving Medicaid payments, an essential source of revenue, and a pending Supreme Court case could allow other states to follow suit. As he did during his first term, President Trump could deny abortion providers Title X federal family planning funds — costing Planned Parenthood clinics about $60 million.

The Times published a story about this last year noting that it’s not just PP clinics that are going broke.

Amy Hagstrom Miller, the C.E.O. of Whole Woman’s Health, which operates six clinics in four states as well as one virtual clinic, said only two of them were currently profitable. “Whenever I talk to people about my margins,” she said, “they’re like, ‘Are you kidding me?’”

Procedure rates — which can run from $600 to many thousands for the rare abortions that take place late in a pregnancy — certainly haven’t kept pace with medical inflation, even though everything else about running a health care business, from insurance to equipment to payroll, has become more expensive.

Because the cost of late term abortions are so high, PP of New York had to stop offering them despite New York having the most liberal abortion laws in the country.

The move was the latest sign of financial struggles for Planned Parenthood’s New York chapter, which also plans to close four clinics around the state, including its sole clinic on Staten Island, Ms. Stark said. The chapter has already instituted executive pay cuts and consolidated job functions.

Ms. Stark confirmed that the Manhattan clinic plans to stop providing abortions past 20 weeks of pregnancy on Sept. 3, a change that was first reported by The City. Abortion is legal in New York State through the 24th week of pregnancy, and later in cases where a fetus is not viable or a woman’s life or health is at risk.

Despite being broke and providing crappy care, PP still manages to give millions in political donations which go exclusively (99.85%) to Democrats. This is apparently how the organization is structured. It’s a Democratic fundraiser first and a health provider second.

Since the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022, Planned Parenthood has enjoyed a fund-raising boom, with $498 million in donations that year. But little of it goes to the state affiliates to provide health care at clinics. Instead, under the national bylaws, the majority of the money is spent on the legal and political fight to maintain abortion rights…

Over the last five years, the national office has distributed more than $899 million to affiliates to help them deliver care, but none of it went directly to medical services. By charter, the mission of Planned Parenthood Federation of America is to “provide leadership, advocacy and education in the field of reproductive health care.”

Much of the national funding to affiliates went to legal support, public campaigns to expand abortion access and subsidies for patient navigators who help patients access abortions.

So there you have it. Planned Parenthood is going broke even as it continues to spend lavishly on lobbying and propaganda. They used to have 5 million patients and now they are bragging about having 2 million.