Olympia Maintains Abortion Funding in Budget, Despite Desparate Need for Budget Cuts

It seems the legislators in Olympia came to a budget deal yesterday evening, April 27. While some journalists have spoken of "painful cuts" the Democrats made, one cut they could have made that would have saved a lot of pain never happened.

They decided to continue spending $7 million a year in subsidies to the abortion industry.

Now technically these subsidies take the form of Medicaid insurance payments, not direct bailouts. But as we have documented on this blog, and is now well summarized on the campaign website to end tax-funding of abortion in Washington, this money ends up almost entirely in the hands of a handful of abortionists and abortion clinic operators making a quarter of a million dollars a year in some cases.

Most pro-abortion politicians claim they want to see the abortion rate go down. Well, there's nothing they could do that would reduce the abortion rate faster than to stop making abortion free.

What's even more shocking is that much of this money goes to Planned Parenthood of Western Washington (now of the Great Northwest), as well as other Planned Parenthood affiliates. But as we've exclusively exposed on this blog, Planned Parenthood is engaged in systematic and deliberate Medicaid fraud.

Under the 340B Drug Discount Program, they buy specially discounted drugs like oral contraceptives and the abortifacient morning-after pill, Plan B, for about $2 per unit, and then illegally bill Medicaid about $20 per unit, generating about $18 in illegal profits in each case. According to their public 990 tax forms, this is generating between $7 and $10 million in pure and illegal profit a year.

In fact, PPWW just released their shocking 2007 tax returns (stay tuned for further analysis), showing a record revenue of $37 million, total profit of $5 million, and $40 million now sitting in the bank!!!

Moreover, on this latest form, they seem to have changed their long-standing accounting practice whereby they broke out their profits from "sales of inventory". This change happened after we started our investigation and brought this illegal billing practice to the attention of authorities.

Perhaps the saddest part is that we have notified authorities, including Maureen Considine, director of Family Planning at the Department of Health and Human Services, of this fraud, but their response was that unless Planned Parenthood presents a signed affidavit of confession, they aren't going to investigate.

For those having trouble believing this, bear in mind that this fraud is exactly the same as the fraud being charged in the California by former Chief Financial Officer of Planned Parenthood of Los Angeles, P. Victor Gonzalez, in his False Claims case against his former employer to the tune of $180 million.

Let's just say: you haven't heard the last of this story.