After nearly two weeks of serious nail biting, reproductive health care advocates are breathing a (half) sigh of relief after learning today that budget conferees have left alone the funding scheme for more than $40 million in funds designated for family planning health services that serve thousands of poor and uninsured women.
The relief is only partial, however, because lawmakers also decided to allocate an additional $3 million over the biennium, taken from general revenue, to beef up funding for the Alternatives to Abortion program — the rider authored in 2005 by Sen. Tommy Williams, R-The Woodlands, to fund so-called “crisis pregnancy centers,” unregulated entities that provide no medical services, and instead “promote childbirth.” The program is currently funded with $2.5 million each year that was taken from the family planning budget. The proposed increase would represent a 60% budget hike over the current biennium.
Why the program needs the increase in funding isn’t at all clear. The entity that administers the program, the Texas Pregnancy Care Network (which formed nearly four years ago to take advantage of the new funding opportunity), has been unable to spend the entire $2.5 million currently allocated to the program each year on actual services to clients. In fact, TPCN has consistently failed to meet its own goals — for the number of individual CPCs that would contract with the state to provide services, for example, or for the number of clients actually served. The group has, however, done a nice job of spending cash on administrative expenses: Roughly 40% of the entire budget has been spent that way, including generous pay raises for TPCN’s executive director, attorney Vincent Friedewald, whose pay rose from $93,372 in 2007 to more than $100,000 in 2009.
While lawmakers in both chambers must first approve, and Gov. Rick Perry must then sign off on the compromise budget, it seems safe to bet that Friedewald will be getting another pay bump in September.
Nonetheless, the overall family planning budget remains not only intact, but will see a $7.2 million increase to cover costs associated with Medicaid — including an increase in the reimbursement rate for oral contraceptives, which will rise from the insanely paltry $2.80 per pack to $20.88 each.
This article appears in May 15 • 2009.