So much for promises on family planning funds

When the Legislature voted four years ago to defund Planned Parenthood clinics in Kansas, lawmakers promised that the federal funding would be redirected to county health departments and hospitals, so that low-income women could continue to receive pap smears, cancer screenings and family planning services. But that didn’t happen.

Even worse, those health departments now receive less family planning funding than they did before. This includes Sedgwick County, which is expected to receive $110,000 less this fiscal year than two years ago.

So much for the promises.

Long before the current controversy over secretly recorded videos of Planned Parenthood officials, the Legislature voted in 2011 to block funding to family planning clinics. Lawmakers dismissed concerns that such a move violated federal rules and could leave low-income women without access to affordable health services. They promised the Title X money would be reallocated to public health departments and other Title X facilities that would provide the same, if not better, services.

Planned Parenthood of Kansas and Mid-Missouri filed a lawsuit to block the law. But after an appeals court ruled in 2014 that Kansas could go ahead and withhold funding from the clinics while the case advanced, Planned Parenthood dropped the lawsuit.

As a result of the funding loss, Planned Parenthood closed its Hays clinic. A clinic in Dodge City that wasn’t affiliated with Planned Parenthood also closed. Neither clinic performed abortions, and there are no other Title X clinics in those counties.

But don’t worry – the $370,000 in federal funding would now go to health departments. Except it didn’t. The Kansas Department of Health and Environment told Associated Press that the federal government reduced Title X funding to Kansas by the amount previously awarded to Planned Parenthood, as some had warned would happen.

Not only did the Sedgwick County Health Departments not receive additional funding, the state cut its funding. It expects to receive $167,790 in family planning funds this fiscal year compared with $276,900 in fiscal year 2014, AP reported.

“People have fewer places to go, and for those with limited means, that may make utilizing those services even more difficult,” J’Vonnah Maryman, director for public health at the Sedgwick County Health Department, told AP.

Before losing the Title X funds, Planned Parenthood clinics in Wichita and Hays provided 9,000 birth-control visits, 3,000 pap tests, 3,000 breast exams, and 18,000 tests for sexually transmitted diseases, AP reported. Now, Planned Parenthood is seeing fewer patients at its Wichita clinic (which doesn’t provide abortions), while the Sedgwick County Health Department has not seen an increase in patients for family planning services.

And what about low-income women who live in Hays and Dodge City? The state suggests they travel to other counties to get reproductive health care services – as if that were no small matter in western Kansas.

As Congress debates whether to defund Planned Parenthood nationally, some lawmakers are promising that the family planning and other services still will be provided. Based on what happened in Kansas, those promises may also be empty.

For the editorial board, Phillip Brownlee

This story was originally published September 2, 2015 at 7:06 PM with the headline "So much for promises on family planning funds."