MORE STATES MOVE TO END FEDERAL FLOW OF FUNDS TO PLANNED PARENTHOOD

Despite the Obama administration’s threat against terminating federal funding of Planned Parenthood, more states are cutting Medicaid funds to the nation’s largest abortion provider following videos that have exposed top medical directors of the organization engaged in the harvesting of body parts of aborted babies for potential sale to biomedical companies.

On Friday, Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson (R) directed his state Department of Human Services to terminate its Medicaid contract with Planned Parenthood, effective 30 days from a letter dated Friday, August 14, 2015, states a press release from the governor’s office.

Hutchinson said:

It is apparent that after the recent revelations on the actions of Planned Parenthood, that this organization does not represent the values of the people of our state and Arkansas is better served by terminating any and all existing contracts with them. This includes their affiliated organization, Planned Parenthood of Arkansas and Eastern Oklahoma.

I appreciate the legislature’s leadership on this important issue, especially that of Senator Eddie Joe Williams and Representative David Meeks.

Additionally, Utah Gov. Gary Herbert (R) has ordered his state’s agencies to end sending federal funds to Planned Parenthood.

According to the Idaho State Journal, Herbert said in a statement Friday that he was troubled by the recent investigative videos.

Alabama, Louisiana, and New Hampshire are also in the process of terminating Medicaid contracts with Planned Parenthood.

As more states move to end their Medicaid contracts with Planned Parenthood, StemExpress, the biomedical company that has acknowledged working with the organization in obtaining the body parts of aborted babies, has also said it will cut its tieswith Planned Parenthood.

According to the Wall Street Journal, Planned Parenthood executive vice president Dawn Laguens, said in a statement:

The federal government has made it clear that states cannot cut women off from high-quality health care at Planned Parenthood like this. It’s unlawful, unpopular, and harmful to women—and that’s why politicians who have tried to do this in other states have failed. Planned Parenthood will continue to fight on behalf of the people who count on us for high-quality healthcare across Arkansas.

In an earlier statement last week on Planned Parenthood’s website, Laguens said, “Extremists who oppose Planned Parenthood’s mission and services are making outrageous and completely false claims. They are engaged in a fraud, and other claims they’ve made have been discredited and disproven.”

Asserting that “the extremists” show “a total lack of compassion and dignity for women’s most personal medical decisions,” Laguens said the Planned Parenthood medical staff, shown in the videos in a lab separating the body parts of aborted babies, were actually engaging in “standard medical practice to review tissue to ensure the health and safety of patients…”

“Planned Parenthood’s medical providers and staff are the best in the country,” she said. “We have the highest professional standards, and we take swift action if we are ever aware of an instance where those standards aren’t being met.”

However, in April of 2013, in the midst of the trial of abortionist Kermit Gosnell – who was ultimately convicted of murdering infants born alive during abortion procedures – Breitbart News reported that Planned Parenthood Southeast Pennsylvania president and CEO Dayle Steinberg, speaking at a fundraiser, admitted that she knew what was transpiring at Gosnell’s “house of horrors,” but neither she nor her organization reported it to state health officials or others who could have stepped in.

Instead, Steinberg said Planned Parenthood left it up to women, traumatized by the horrors of Gosnell’s clinic, to report him.

“We would always encourage them to report it to the Department of Health,” she said.

With the release of the recent videos produced by Center for Medical Progress, national pro-life groups are calling out those who would continue to defend Planned Parenthood.

“We can now add harvesting baby organs without the consent of the mother to the list of ethical violations and criminal activities committed inside Planned Parenthood clinics,” said Lila Rose, president of Live Action, in a statement sent to Breitbart News. “If this was any other business there would be a rush by media and politicians for full disclosure, defunding and calls to shut down what appears to be a criminal enterprise.”

Following the most recent video in which StemExpress whistleblower Holly O’Donnell reveals details of how her former company, in conjunction with Planned Parenthood, did not obtain consent from women to take their babies’ body parts following abortion, Kristan Hawkins, president of Students for Life of America, told Breitbart News, “This is betrayal in its worst forms. This is where the war on women is taking place.”

Hawkins, whose organization coordinated the #WomenBetrayed movement and rallies at the end of July, added:

For Planned Parenthood, an organization whose only talking point is that they are there for women in their time of need, that they care about women, that they are fighting for women’s health, this particular video is a devastating reminder that behind the façade of Planned Parenthood lies a horrible group that sells women out – and sells the body parts of their babies – for money.

Via: Breitbart

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From Shutdown to Amnesty

My fear is that having stuck it to the establishment with a defund strategy that, unfortunately, could never work, House Republicans will now turn around and do the establishment’s bidding on so-called comprehensive immigration reform.

1) The Republican leadership is going to feel pressure to do some sort of bi-partisan pivot in a misbegotten attempt to repair the party’s image, which at least for now is uniformly in the toilet in every poll.

2) The political judgment of the groups and members who favored the shutdown strategy and most strongly oppose amnesty is going to be highly suspect after defunding didn’t work. This will give them less influence in the immigration fight than they would have had otherwise.

3) The supporters of defunding in the House could use a few dozen members to drive the rest of the caucus. The dynamic will be different on immigration. Because Democrats all opposed any fiscal measure offered by the Republican leadership, the votes of those few dozen members were essential to passing anything. On immigration, Democrats could well support incremental immigration measures to get to a conference with the Senate, meaning a few dozen Republican votes against don’t mean anything anymore.

If the upshot of all this is that Obamacare is not defunded, the Republican party’s standing is diminished and we get a disastrous immigration bill, it will depressing indeed.

Via: NRO

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House sends government spending bill to the Senate without Obamacare funding

The House on Friday approved a bill to temporarily fund the government that would strip funding for the 2010 federal health care law known as Obamacare, a move that will set up a showdown with the Senate next week that could result in a government shutdown.

The bill, which Democrats in the Senate plan to reject in its current form, would set spending levels at $986.3 billion through Dec. 15. Congress must pass a bill to set federal funding levels, known as a continuing resolution (CR) by Oct. 1, or the government will partially close. House Republicans see the mandatory deadline as a final opportunity to cripple the 3-year-old health care law.

While conservatives in the House see the passage of the bill as a victory, the celebration will be short-lived. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid intends to strip out the part of the bill that defunds the health care law when the upper chamber takes up the measure next week. In a statement Thursday, President Barack Obama vowed to veto any CR that does not include funding for the law.

The move by House Republicans comes amid a fierce internal party battle over how to tackle the Affordable Care, a law that was found constitutional by the Supreme Court in 2012. For months, Republican leaders resisted calls from conservative members in the House and Senate to use the CR as a vehicle to defund the law, but they relented this week by announcing that the bill sent to the Senate would not include funding for the law. They preferred, instead, to seek a delay of the law's individual mandate to purchase health insurance by tying it to a vote to raise the federal government's borrowing limit.

In the Senate, four Republicans, Ted Cruz of Texas, Rand Paul of Kentucky, Marco Rubio of Florida and Mike Lee of Utah, have led an aggressive effort to defund the health care law. They have enraged other Republicans by saying publicly that those who vote for government spending measures that include funding for Obamacare effectively support the Democratic health care law.

Via: Yahoo News

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THE 4 W’S OF DEFUNDING OBAMACARE

Obamacare is a predictable failure because it is based on the idea that government manipulation and control of the health care system can improve outcomes for patients, reduce costs and increase choice.   It can’t, and it was only a matter of time before even Democratic support for the law began to erode.

The question is what Congress can do now given President Obama’s intransigence on the issue.  The answer is the total and complete defunding of Obamacare.  In Iowa, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX)made the compelling case to do just that:

WHO has the power to make sure Obamacare is stopped in its tracks?  Our Senators andRepresentatives have the power to do so by defunding the law.  The Constitution grants Congress the “power of the purse.”  Through legislation, Congress can make certain the Obama administration is not given another dime to implement this disastrous law.  We must also keep the pressure on Congress and give them our support by making calls, using Twitter and Facebook, writing emails, and visiting offices.

Via: Heritage Action for America

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