Bush Claims He ‘Misspoke’ About Women’s Healthcare Funding

“Isn’t one benefit of an establishment candidate supposed to be that he’s not going to make gaffes like this?” senior writer at The National Review John McCormack tweeted.

“You could take dollar for dollar-although I’m not sure we need half a billion dollars for women’s health issues-but if you took dollar for dollar, there are many extraordinarily fine community health organizations that exist to provide quality care for women on a wide variety of health issues”, he said.

Jeb Bush said he’s not sure we need half a billion dollars for women’s health issues.

One wants to defund Planned Parenthood, and the other would allow another government shutdown to prove a point. Former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee called the Senate’s failure to advance the defunding bill “salt in a sick, grotesque wound”. Maybe he thinks Planned Parenthood is a smaller operation than it actually is. When you attack women’s health, you attack America’s health. “Democrats and Republicans agree we absolutely must defund them and redirect those funds to other women’s health organizations“. “Was her health not worth the money?” she said.

Planned Parenthood, meanwhile, lambasted the remark, saying it is emblematic of Bush’s beliefs.

“Title X grants are funded through competition. If Planned Parenthood were to be defunded, it would disrupt and, in some states, dismantle the Title X family planning program”. The anti-abortion group behind the videos, Center for Medical Progress, claims the footage shows Planned Parenthood skirts rules barring any profit from fetal remains, a charge Planned Parenthood strongly denies.

From Clinton’s official account, her campaign tweeted Bush’s remark, tagged the former Florida governor and said: “You are absolutely, unequivocally wrong”.

The story has served social conservatives well because it’s turned the debate around Planned Parenthood’s funding away from generic conversations around the organization’s health services and toward the unsettling details of abortion procedures, as well as a set of specific allegations against the group. She pointed to a recent study by George Washington University that found Texas’ limitation of funding to Planned Parenthood would result in long wait times at community health centers, less comprehensive contraceptive options for clients, and and potentially increased costs to clients.

I went over this yesterday, but briefly: Most of the federal money Planned Parenthood gets is in the form of Medicaid reimbursements for health services, things like gynecological exams, cancer screening, the provision of contraception, and so on.

I have been, as many of you have, fighting for women and children and families for my entire life.

Now, the idea of whether women can visit a Planned Parenthood clinic at all has become part of the ideological debate. In the first case, Bush said he was referring to the need for more full-time jobs; in the second, he said he was discussing the need to move to a more efficient, better-financed Medicare system.