State Must Cancel 'Take Charge', End Bogus Birth Control Boondoggle for Planned Parenthood

Readers of this blog know that we were the first to call attention to a little known state Medicaid program called Take Charge, and have worked hard to get it terminated.

So we were thrilled to discover, originally from Planned Parenthood as it turns out, that the the 10-year-old program is on the chopping block. With record budget shortfalls, Olympia is being forced against their will to find programs to cut. And the Department of Social and Health Services (DSHS) has indicated that all optional Medicaid programs are fair game.

Take Charge is a federally approved exception to standard Medicaid rules exclusive to Washington State. It means about 50,000 low-income women who normally are above the income cutoff for Medicaid can get free birth control for a year courtesy of taxpayers. (When liberals says 'get the government out of my sex life', they only mean when the government is encouraging the formation of new life, it turns out.)

The program started in 2000, under the Bush Administration, and has turned into a massive financial boondoggle for Planned Parenthood in this state. They admit that half of their clients are Take Charge enrollees. The massive expansion of PP in Washington State over the last decade has largely been bankrolled through this program.

Now Planned Parenthood is lobbying hard to have this program continued. Their argument is not that their CEO, Christine Charbonneau, will have to live on less than a quarter million dollars a year salary. No, their argument, is that cutting the program "will generate another $50 million annually in new state costs because of new unintended pregnancies."

This of course is absolute bunk.

For that figure to be accurate, about a quarter of the 50,000 Take Charge clients would have to end up pregnant every year. We know that about half of unplanned pregnancies end up in abortion, and about half end up in live babies (not including natural miscarriages). This would mean about 5,600 new abortions (at about $600 a piece), and about 5,600 new births on Medicaid (at about $8,000 each).

The state's own numbers on Medicaid abortions puts the figure just shy of 13,000. PP wants us to believe the number will jump 40%! The state also says that it pays for over 42,000 births a year. PP wants us to believe this figure would 13% in a single year. This would be unheard of.

They might have a leg to stand on if the historical figures showed a drop of that magnitude when the program came into effect. But if you look at the state's numbers on Medicaid-paid births and abortions before and after 2000, when the program began, you see absolutely no inflection in the trendline whatsoever. Indeed, Medicaid-paid births went from 32,000 before the program began to the 42,000+ figure of today.

Similarly, the number of Medicaid-paid abortions was relatively steady in between 10k and 11k in the late 90s, and then started to climb as the program got underway until it reached a high of 14,165 in 2004.

Consistent with this is the fact that Planned Parenthood of Western Washington saw its number of abortions, which theoretically should have been declining, skyrocket during this time. We don't know how many babies they were killing until 2004, but they jumped 50% from about 6,000 at that time to over 9,000 in 2007.

The fact is, contrary to one of the most sacred tenets of sexual liberalism, putting thousands of low-income women with brown skin on birth control doesn't make abortion go away.

As we reported, according to Seattle's own late-term abortionist extraordinaire, Deb Oyer, half of all women having abortions were on birth control. And according to the independent sources, actual failure rates for oral contraception is about 8%. So from a group of 50,000 PP clients, that equates to 2,000 abortion clients a year.

So Washington State Planned Parenthood's propaganda to save their best single source of revenue through the last decade can be seen to be, like just about everything else they say, a pile of junk. We call on the Gregoire Administration to do what the Bush Administration would not. Kill this program now.