Don’t ask why but I got this story from of all places, Think Progress…
State law requires a licensed pharmacist to dispense prescriptions, but it contains an exemption for family-planning clinics if they operate under contract with the New Hampshire Department of Health and Human Services.
In April, Right to Life filed a complaint with the Board of Pharmacy claiming that exemption no longer applies.
The presumption is that when the NH Executive council terminated State funding the relationship with NH-DES ended, thereby…um…aborting the exemption.
So NH Right to like would like to see Planned Parenthood stop dispensing prescriptions. No more one stop…stop. I’m fine with that. If the law is clear then so be it. And if Planned Parenthood wants to dispense then they hire pharmacists and license them or write prescriptions like any other health care provider would for patients who go to a pharmacy like everyone else.
If the law is flawed or not clear then we have this thing called a legislative process…I won’t go into detail becasue the left would rather just find a judge to legislate past those hurdles for them.
Anyway, while that is interesting, what I found more so was the Think Progress language they used in the article. I’m not linking to it but here is a sample.
Earlier this summer, Republicans attempted to shut down New Hampshire’s Planned Parenthood branches by blocking state funds, citing the familiar far-right argument that Planned Parenthood shouldn’t receive funding for the range of preventative health services they provide for low-income women because abortions make up three percent of their total services. Because the organization was forced to seek direct funding from Washington to keep their health clinics open,…
Where to start…where to start…
No one tried to shut down anything except the taxpayer support of Planned Parenthood which has made it clear more than once that it does not need public money. Planned Parenthood would not shut down if they stopped getting free money. Suggesting it would is, well, dishonest.
The far right, right, near right, almost right, and a lot of the center (and even a few folks as we head leftward) are uncomfortable with the government using taxpayer dollars for anything at all related to abortion (which includes handing out RU-486), but they are also not terribly comfortable with the government using their taxpayer dollars to pay for contraception. Seeing as this just happens to be about the latter as well as the former, making a 3% argument, which is not even accurate because RU-486 is not included in that number, is also dishonest.
The organization was not forced to seek direct funding from the Federal government. New Hampshire Senator Jeanne Shaheen, in contradiction to the will of the elected representatives charged with determining the funding of state contracts, ran as fast as she could to the Federal trough to replace the money the Executive Council felt PP should not get, given that there are more than a few taxpayers who object to such things, on conscientious grounds, moral grounds, political grounds, and lets face it, plenty of people who are OK with abortion simply do not think the state should be giving money to any business at all on fiscal grounds.
But the bottom feeders at Stink Progress will absorb the blue slime without a thought and shake their heads in disbelief. Meanwhile, back in reality, we are hoping to replace Senator Shaheen in a few years with a Senator who leaves state business to the state where it belongs.
One other point. Do we need to revisit the rules that allow clinics to dispense if they are on the take from the taxpayers through NH-HHS? I’m not a fan of abusive licensing practices but this might be an exception.
