The Observer is on it this time, and as before if you’re not mad by the time you’ve finished reading you’re doing it wrong.
Right there with them
The state of Texas has poured hundreds of thousands of taxpayer dollars into [Carol] Everett’s clinic, which opened in a strip mall in Round Rock last spring, and millions through her anti-abortion organization, the Heidi Group. Everett’s group was tapped as a test case in the effort to defund Planned Parenthood and lift up faith-based, anti-abortion clinics in state and national family planning programs. It didn’t go well. In September, the state announced it would end Everett’s funding, two weeks after the Observer reported that the group had served just 5 percent of the patients promised in its first year.
Now, internal documents, communications and financial statements obtained by the Observer, along with state records and interviews with half a dozen former Heidi Group employees and with Everett, paint a picture of mismanagement, contract violations, lack of oversight and misuse of taxpayer funds — problems that state officials knew about even as they continued to extend the Heidi Group’s contract for more than two years.
[…]
State lawmakers have funnelled millions into the kind of clinics that Everett has championed. The budget for Texas’ Alternatives to Abortion program, which funds faith-based pregnancy centers, has grown 16-fold since its inception in 2006, following this legislative session, with a total investment of about $170 million through 2021. In 2011, Republican lawmakers slashed the state’s family planning budget by two-thirds, shuttering 82 clinics. Two years later, they kicked Planned Parenthood and other abortion provider affiliates out of the state’s low-income women’s health program, forgoing millions in federal dollars to begin a state-funded program instead. At the time, less than a quarter of the estimated 1.8 million poor Texas women in need of publicly funded contraceptive services were getting them. The cuts resulted in tens of thousands more women losing access to reproductive health services like gynecological exams, birth control, cancer screenings and STD testing.
Then, in 2016, the state’s goals and Everett’s aligned in what she called “the greatest possibility for expansion of pro-life care for the poor ever.” Texas’ health agency had scrambled for years to rebuild the reproductive health care safety net without established family planning providers like Planned Parenthood. Now, the Health and Human Services Commission (HHSC) was launching a replacement program called Healthy Texas Women, which would provide reproductive health care and preventive screenings to low-income women. Officials needed someone to fill the gap left by Planned Parenthood, which had previously served 40 percent of patients in Texas’ women’s health program.
Everett had no experience with state family planning programs. But officials awarded her multimillion-dollar contracts to find and oversee providers in Healthy Texas Women and in the Family Planning Program, the state’s other reproductive health program that also covers men and undocumented patients. Everett pledged to serve an astounding 69,000 patients in the two programs during her first year — more than Planned Parenthood.
The experiment failed dramatically. For fiscal year 2017, the Heidi Group was awarded $1.6 million to serve 51,000 patients in Healthy Texas Women; it spent $1.3 million and served 2,300, according to HHSC data. In the Family Planning Program, the group got $5.1 million to serve nearly 18,000 people. After realizing the Heidi Group was falling short of those targets, the state clawed back and reallocated funds mid-year. It ended up spending $605,000 to serve just over 1,000 patients. HHSC released data for fiscal year 2018 in May, but did not specify the number of patients served by contractors. According to an Observer analysis, which added the patients served by Heidi Group subcontractors and the Heidi Clinic in each program in 2018, roughly 4,000 patients were served through Healthy Texas Women and about 2,700 through the Family Planning Program. The state ended Everett’s contracts in December, and launched an investigation into more than $1 million in questionable spending. Her own clinic, which has served just a few hundred women, faces an uncertain future.
Read the rest. The Chron wrote a similar story a couple of months ago, and it’s just as infuriating. Ultimately, I think Carol Everett was a true believer who got way in over her head by being in the right place at the right time with the right things to say. She’s not evil, she’s just Forrest Gump’s incompetent anti-abortion zealot cousin. It’s everyone who enabled the system to throw millions of dollars at her, all the while consigning thousands of poor women to crappy-at-best health care, who deserve all the scorn. That’s Greg Abbott, his appointed flunkies at HHSC like Stuart Bowen, Dan Patrick, Ken Paxton, and every Republican legislator who voted to kick out Planned Parenthood. They made this mess, and some day it will be up to the rest of us to clean it up.