Free Republic

In a new video, former Planned Parenthood employees reveal they were incentivized to pressure women into getting abortions to meet monthly corporate quotas.In the video from Live Action, Sue Thayer, a former Planned Parenthood manager in Storm Lake, Iowa, explained that if her center met its quota for abortion referrals, employees would be rewarded with pizza parties, paid time off, and other rewards.After administering a pregnancy test to a woman, Planned Parenthood employees would tell her how much it cost and ask how much she would be able to pay towards it. If a woman was unable to pay for a...

SACRAMENTO – Graciela Barrios, an undocumented immigrant, has long relied on her Sacramento County health clinic for the advice, medication and tests that keep her diabetes under control. But next month, Barrios and thousands like her will be on their own as communities cut nonemergency health services to illegal immigrants and more local governments are forced to make similar decisions. Nearby Contra Costa County will vote tomorrow on whether to cut services to the 5,000 illegal immigrants they serve each year. “The general situation there is being faced by nearly every health department across the country, and if not right...

SAN FRANCISCO - A group of restaurant owners filed a lawsuit Wednesday that could jeopardize funding for The City’s ambitious plan to provide health care for more than 82,000 uninsured residents. Pushed by Mayor Gavin Newsom and Supervisor Tom Ammiano, the recently adopted health care ordinance was unanimously approved by the Board of Supervisors, but largely opposed by the business community, which will have to pay a portion of the program’s estimated $200 million price tag. The program is expected to begin this July. The Golden Gate Restaurant Association, a nonprofit group representing the interests of restaurant owners, allege in...

ASHINGTON, Feb. 4 - President Bush's budget for 2006 cuts spending for a wide range of public health programs, including several to protect the nation against bioterrorist attacks and to respond to medical emergencies, budget documents show. Faced with constraints on spending caused by record budget deficits and the demands of the war in Iraq, administration officials said on Friday that they had increased the budget for some health programs but cut many others, including some that address urgent health care needs. The documents show, for example, that Mr. Bush would cut spending for several programs that deal with epidemics,...

California politicians love to gripe about how the state gets shorted by the federal government. Those complaints sound peculiar against the background of some recent news. Over the last three years, the state Department of Health Services has received about $100 million in federal funds to fight bioterrorism, and officials there can't seem to account for it. Where has the money gone? DHS officials can't seem to say. Department officials were unable to provide Bee science writer Edie Lau last week with a detailed breakdown of how the $100 million was spent. And this comes after two recent reports that...

LOS ANGELES (AP) - A day after hundreds of protesters objected to closing the trauma center at Martin Luther King Jr./Drew Medical Center, the county released findings that treatment at the center is "poor to marginal." The Los Angeles County Department of Health Services, which runs King/Drew, released a one-page executive summary Tuesday that described the findings by two trauma experts. A full report is due in about two weeks. The timing of the findings was questioned by some supporters of the trauma center, which serves a poor stretch of South Los Angeles and serves victims of gunshot wounds, stabbings...