Conservatives Target Preventive Health Care for the Ax
By Donna Cooper | February 10, 2011
It seems we've entered the season of shortsighted thinking. With 50.7
million uninsured Americans, Republicans are on a rampage to repeal
the Affordable Care Act. Adding insult to injury, the most recent
House Republican plan to cut the federal budget deficit this fiscal
year took a scalpel to $10 billion in federal grants that provide
health care to indigent women and children, slashing $2 billion in
federal funding that is bound to have very expensive consequences.
Funding for community health centers will be cut in half by the
Republican cuts. Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-UT), who was a co-sponsor of the
legislation responding to President George W. Bush's call to expand
funding for these centers in 2008, says that "since 2001, additional
funding has allowed health centers in more than 750 communities
nationwide to provide care to about four million new patients. These
centers provide affordable and quality care to at-risk Americans who
otherwise might have to do without."
He's right on the mark. No health care costs will be avoided by
cutting this $1 billion out of the budget because the absence of care
doesn't stop you from getting sick. It simply means you get sicker and
you turn up at the emergency room or a hospital when your illness has
progressed to the point that your care needs are exorbitantly
expensive.
On top of this cut to care, which more often than not is the safety-
net care for women and children, the proposals would also cut the
maternal and child health block grant by 30 percent. This block grant
pays for child immunizations and prenatal care for tens of thousands
of women and children. It's obvious that without access to
immunizations more will have to be spent to care for kids sick with
easily preventable illnesses.
And reducing access to prenatal care is both life-threatening and
costly. A preemie baby's health care costs are 10 times higher than a
full-term, healthy-weight child, according to the March of Dimes. The
organization estimates that the full lifetime health care costs for
these fragile children hit the $17 billion mark. It's simply penny
wise and pound foolish to cut $199 million out of a program that has a
proven track record of delivering health to babies and driving down
America's health care costs.
Among the programs slashed is one of the most efficient programs to
improve child nutrition: the Women, Infants and Children program run
by the Department of Agriculture. This program gives expectant mothers
with very small children important tips on how to feed their children
healthy meals. And it provides them with coupons to incentivize them
to purchase the best foods for their children. Research shows that
without this intervention the nutritional intake of these children
would be higher in fats, salts, and sugars, according to a recent U.S.
Food and Nutrition Services study.
Instead of spending $1,400 a month in extra medical care for an obese
child, for just $41 per month this program shifts these young mothers
and children into healthy eating patterns, says the Centers for
Disease Control and Prevention. Clearly, the WIC approach is a useful
and relatively cheap way to stem the rising tide of childhood obesity.
An unsurprising but equally shortsighted cut is the complete
elimination of family-planning services. If you just listened to their
sound bites, you would think these funds could be used for abortions.
But we all know that's not permitted. These federal funds make it
possible for uninsured women and men to get access to critical
contraceptive services, pregnancy counseling, and tests for sexually
transmitted infections, cervical cancer screening, and other critical
health screens. Without access to these health care services, the
health care needs of these adults will not disappear.
Instead, these adults will end up with unintended pregnancies and
preventable health conditions that could have been avoided had they
had ready access to commonplace family-planning services and
screenings. Indeed, every dollar spent on family-planning services
saves taxpayers $4 in Medicaid-funded prenatal, delivery, and
postpartum services alone, according to a recent study by the
Guttmacher Institute.
The absurdity of these cuts to the block grant, community health care
centers, and family-planning services is that none of this funding
would be necessary if we had a fully functioning national health care
system where every American had access to high-quality care.
Benjamin Franklin famously said, "An ounce of prevention is worth a
pound of cure." Millions more Americans will lose access to health
care as a result of these cuts and as a result more will have to be
spent to address the real health care consequences of these cuts.
Franklin also invented bifocals so his aging colleagues could see the
important documents they gathered to draft. Perhaps the Republican
leadership needs to adjust their glasses so they more clearly see that
$2 billion in cuts they propose to the health care services for poor
women and children will cost the taxpayers billions more in
unnecessary health care expenses.
http://www.americanprogress.org/issues/2011/02/health_care_cuts.html
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