Kansas governor to outline agenda in State of State address

Elise Higgins, with Planned Parenthood, said Medicaid dollars support health care services, not abortions.

According to an AP report: “The federal government reduced its Title X funding to the state by about the $370,000 annually in Title X money that two Planned Parenthood facilities in Wichita and Hays and an unaffiliated clinic in Dodge City had been receiving”. His critics contend his tax-cutting experiment has failed while Brownback and his allies say national economic factors – including slumps in agriculture, aviation and energy production – are keeping Kansas from growing as much as hoped.

A Planned Parenthood lobbyist says Kansas Gov. Sam Brownback’s move to deny Medicaid funds to the group will cost it $61,000 a year.

There’s been a push to expand Medicaid in Kansas, but Brownback offered his own push against the plan. Gov. Brownback’s directive will terminate funding for Planned Parenthood, freeing up money for more widely available and more comprehensive low-priced healthcare optionsfor women and families in Kansas.

“We must keep working to protect our most innocent Kansans, the unborn”, Brownback declared.

Senate Minority Leader Anthony Hensley, a Topeka Democrat, said: “That is a classless performance”. Abortion providers in Kansas – including the regional Planned Parenthood affiliate – said they don’t even have programs for legal donations of fetal tissue by patients. Courts have blocked some of those attempts at least temporarily in Utah, Louisiana, Alabama and other states.

“I am disappointed on behalf of the women who rely on us for health care that the governor has chosen to make them his political scapegoat”, she told the Associated Press.

Brownback has taken several strong actions against abortion in the past.

“I call on the Legislature to design a new education funding system that puts more of our money into instruction, that provides bonuses for exceptional teachers and recognizes their true value to our future and the souls of our students”, said Brownback.

The governor also a year ago called on the state medical board to investigate whether for-profit fetal tissue sales are occurring in Kansas, in violation of a state ban. The board has not announced any results.

“We cut Planned Parenthood funding in 2011 in Kansas and that was litigated and we won the litigation, so this is different court ruling different ways”, he said.

In criticizing Obama’s administration, Brownback also declared that the president’s signature health care overhaul, enacted in 2010, is “failing”. Seated behind Brownback are Senate President Susan Wagle, left, and Speaker of the House Ray Merrick.

Republicans in Kansas have resisted expanding the state’s Medicaid program as the federal health care law encouraged but face continued pressure to consider it because of financial problems facing rural hospitals.

“I believe this working group should have frontline stakeholders involved, including a rural hospital administrator and a rural physician, at the same time as top policymakers”, Brownback said.