facepalm of the day

[GenuineRisk]

Originally Posted by OldDog

Approximately 9,000 CHCs are spread across the country, and outnumber PP facilities 12 to 1. They exist in nearly every congressional district. They provide more comprehensive health services than PP, including mammograms. They serve over 23 million individuals, regardless of ability to pay. What don't they do? They don't do abortions. In addition to the CHCs, there are more than 2,000 pregnancy care centers nationally (CareNet, Heartbeat, NIFLA), available to help women who find themselves in unplanned pregnancies. The caveat? They don't do abortions.

And they are not capable of filling the hole defunding PP would create. That's just bs spread by right-wingers who dislike women and don't think women should have access to reproductive health (well, not poor women, anyway. Their own wives and daughters, well, that's different). We have seen what happens to access to women's care in Texas, when PP clinics shut down:

http://www.vox.com/2015/9/24/9373721...somewhere-else

In fact, this article has pretty clear stats on what happens whenever PPs shut down and the result has always been the same- a lot of women lose access to health care and go without.

From an economic standpoint, PP is considerably more efficient at delivering reproductive care than these community centers. The fact that you are pointing to a lack of mammogram machines in the clinics stands out as a misunderstanding of reproductive health care. So, let me shed some light- mammography machines are f*cking expensive to acquire and f*cking expensive to maintain. Economically, it's much more efficient for PP clinics to refer patients to a large hospital or facility that has one and has a department devoted to doing them all day long, rather than spend the money acquiring and maintaining one themselves. It saves patients money, and it saves the federal government money. That way they can spend more of those dollars on more inexpensive things, like Pap smears and birth control:

I assure you, all of those community health centers are not outfitted with mammography machines, either. They also don't have the staff or space or resources to deal with the sheer number of patients PP sees. From the article:

"To put it another way: Planned Parenthood clinics comprise only 10 percent of publicly funded contraceptive clinics — but see 36 percent of patients who use the government birth control programs. Their clinics have developed a specialty in this area, and are particularly tailored toward providing reproductive health care. The other clinics that see fewer birth control patients, however, don't have that specialty — and experts say they'd struggle to absorb additional patients."