POLITIFACT

State will spend $285 million on such efforts, but not for abortions.

True: PolitiFact checks a statement by Joe Pojman about Texas’ funding of women’s health.

At a Texas Capitol rally, an anti-abortion advocate suggested Texas has hit a record pace in funding women’s health.

Joe Pojman of the Texas Alliance for Life saluted Republican leaders for launching investigations in reaction to stealth videos showing Planned Parenthood employees talking rather casu- ally about donations of fetal tissue.

Next, Pojman told the crowd, to cheers and applause: “I just wanted to emphasize, the state of Texas is doing its part. ... The state of Texas is funding ... women’s health services at historically high levels; they just increased that level another $50 million for the next two years.”

Pojman noted that none of the $50 million would go to Planned Parenthood. “Texas takes care of our people and Planned Parenthood is not part of that picture,” he said.

Pojman’s declaration caught our attention in part because actions set in motion by the 2011 Legislature drove down family planning spending in the state budget by more than $70 million (from an existing two-year expenditure of $111 million) in 2012-13. Also in 2011, lawmakers voted to bar state family planning aid from going to health care providers affiliated with organizations that perform or promote abortions, such as Planned Parent-

hood, whose clinics had been the Texas program’s biggest provider of contraceptive care and cancer screening, serving more than 40,000 women a year.

After the 2011 actions, the federal government moved to cut off what had been a 9-to-1 match of federal to state dollars paying to provide contraceptive care for women who otherwise would qualify for Medicaid if they were to become pregnant. State health officials said the affected initiative, launched in 2005, had saved the state money — $21.4 million in 2008, for instance — by reducing Medicaid-financed births. Federal aid accounted for $65 million of the money spent in 2010-11.

Reacting to the pending cutoff, then-Gov. Rick Perry announced state officials would assure such services were delivered through clinics not affiliated with abortion providers. The promised transition fully played out starting in 2013.

So, given all this, could it be the state has set a record for expenditures on women’s health?

We asked Pojman, exec- utive director of the alliance, how he reached his “historically high” conclusion.

Pojman responded with a chart, which he sourced to state budgets, indicating that nearly $285 million in state and federal funds budgeted by the 2015 Legislature for several women’s health efforts in 2016-17 would exceed such spending in each of the nine previous twoyear state budgets, dating to 1998-99 — with the previous record being $240.1 million for such programs in 2014-15. The previous low, per the chart, was $128.8 million in 2012-13.

Pojman’s chart attributed the touted $50 million in fresh spending to a provision in the 2016-17 budget stating the money should “increase access to women’s health and family planning services.”

Pojman said a February 2014 Texas Health and Human Services Commission presentation amounted to a good summary of how the state spends money on women’s health. From that, we pulled these thumbnails:

The Texas Women’s Health Program was put in place by the state starting in 2013 to provide services previously available through the defunct, federally supported Medic- aid Women’s Health Program. The successor program, serving women living at or below 185 percent of the federal poverty level, “retains the same program objectives and client eligibility previously provided by WHP and has expanded program benefits to include treatment of certain sexually transmitted infections.”

Family planning services, available to women of childbearing age and men living at 250 percent of the poverty level or less, offering the tests available in the Women’s Health Program plus sterilizations.

Expanded Primary Health Care, a new program, offered to women 18 and older living at or below 200 percent of the poverty level, covering the services offered in the other programs plus immunizations, mammograms, diagnostic services for women with abnormal breast or cervical cancer test results, cervical dysplasia treatment, individualized case management and prenatal medical and dental services.

Breast and Cervical Cancer Services, open to women living at or below 200 percent of the poverty level, with breast screenings for women aged 50 to 64 and cervi- cal screenings for women aged 21 to 64.

Next, we asked the commission and outside experts about Pojman’s rally statement.

The consensus was that spending budgeted by lawmakers for 201617 would set a record, though some advocates cautioned this didn’t mean all needs would be met and others said that not all the described programs focus only on services typically provided by family planning clinics.

To our inquiry, the Texas Health and Human Services Commission emailed a more detailed chart basically lining up with Pojman’s recap. It looked to us like the appropriated 2016-17 funds for women’s health services exceeded previous two-year expenditures by $40 million or more.

Our ruling

Pojman said the state of Texas “is funding ... women’s health services at historically high levels; they just increased their level another $50 million for the next two years.”

We rate this claim True.