Huffington Post: House GOP Targeting Title X In Push To Axe Family Planning Programs
Title X, the federal family planning grant that funds birth control and preventative health services for more than five million low-income people annually, saves U.S. taxpayers massive amounts of money in Medicaid costs, but GOP lawmakers are trying to axe the program for the second time this year in the name of slashing the deficit.
The cost of covering a Medicaid-funded birth, including prenatal care, delivery, postpartum and infant care for a year, was an estimated $12,613 in 2008, according to a May 2010 Guttmacher Institute study. This far outpaces the cost of providing birth control and other contraceptive services to low-income women at Title X-funded clinics, which averages only $257 per client per year.
Crunching the numbers, every dollar the U.S. government spends on family planning services to help people plan how many children to have and when to have them saves taxpayers about $3.74 in Medicaid birth-related costs. The government spends about $300 million a year on the Title X program, but in 2008 alone, it saved the country $3.4 billion dollars in return.
