Andrea Grimes is a freelance journalist living in Austin with her husband and three cats. She studied new media at New York University and has a master's degree in cultural anthropology from the University of Texas. She is exceptionally talented at finding good-to-great parking spaces.
Yesterday in a packed auditorium at the Texas Department of State Health Services, legislators, doctors and other supporters of Planned Parenthood gathered to speak out–sometimes through tears–against proposed rules that would bar Planned Parenthood from participating in the state’s Women’s Health Program.
Last week, conservative pundit Glenn Beck invited his forty thousand closest friends to join him in “Restoring Love” at Cowboys Stadium in Arlington, Texas. Among them: Minnesota congresswoman Michele Bachmann, who brought her softer side to a special women’s event at a nearby megachurch.
On Monday, Texas Governor Rick Perry rejected two major tenets of the Affordable Care act, saying the state would not participate in the individual state exchanges nor in the Medicaid expansion. What does this mean for a state with the highest rate of uninsured citizens — a state that already rejected federal funds for the Medicaid Women’s Health Program? Experts say the result will be escalating private insurance costs and declining public health.
Newly released documents show Texas Health and Human Services Commissioner Tom Seuhs instructed his staff to try to create new abortion reporting requirements that would please one anti-choice legislator–and also “not be offensive to women.”
The Texas Department of State Health Services Council met this week to push forward the potential adoption of new abortion reporting requirements drafted at the best of one rogue, anti-choice legislator, but the opposition from pro-choice Texans is finally gaining steam.
How did one Texas legislator get the state Department of Health Services to enact requirements on abortion care that failed to pass even the Texas legislature? Documents show the answer is simple: he just asked. Yet despite inquiries, the DSHS can not justify many of the requirements and seems not to have thought them through.
Texas’ new state-only funded Women’s Health Program, built expressly to exclude Planned Parenthood from participation, has launched a website that’s meant to help low-income women find health care providers. But does it work? And is the capacity there to fill the need? Our analysis indicates the answer is no.
![Rush Limbaugh. [img src]](http://rhrealitycheck.wpengine.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/../../files/teaser-images/2012-05-01-grimes-187x125.jpg)
In an overnight decision, the conservative Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals struck down an injunction issued yesterday allowing Planned Parenthood to continue providing Medicaid-funded care in Texas. The judge behind the ruling? Conservative Jerry Smith, a member of Rush Limbaugh’s anti-Obama “team.”
As the State of Texas and Planned Parenthood take their fight for the Women’s Health Program to court, Texas women are left wondering where they will get the health care they need–and when. This is just one woman’s story out of 130,000.
The Texas Department of Health is putting in place vague new abortion requirements, despite repeated failure of a law to mandate them. And even DSHS itself can’t articulate what the reporting requirements mean or why they are necessary.
