1/Hi, I’m going to do a thread on my latest story. I want to make sure the fact that in one week from today #Texas is denying thousands of women access to their choice health care provider amid a pandemic doesn’t get lost in the fray. #txlege https://rewirenewsgroup.com/article/2021/01/25/the-five-year-campaign-to-take-away-health-care-from-texans/

2/Lisa, a domestic violence survivor in Houston, tells me Planned Parenthood “saved” her after her abuser cut private insurance. She was able to access surgery at no cost to repair a painful injury caused by the abuser’s rape. She + 8K women will not be able to access care at PP

3/That means loss of access to preventative HC: birth control, cancer screenings, pap smears, STI testing, annual exams, etc. (NOT #ABORTION as it's federally barred from Medicaid coverage, no matter what the GOP lead you to believe) for very low-income women, mostly of color.

4/The decision is based on the widely discredited PP "sting" videos. Anti-choice activists faced multiple felony charges in CA for invasion of medical privacy but @KenPaxtonTX continues to tout the false and misleading videos as reason to ban PP from Medicaid. Yes, really.

5/While TX reassures there are enough providers to take on the displaced clients, researchers/those on the ground disagree. "The idea that there are all these providers just waiting to take on this patient population does not align with the evidence," Kari White of @TxPEPresearch

6/There's ample evidence to show when Texas anti-choice officials expel patients from Medicaid programs at PP, negative outcomes arise-- look at the cautionary tale of the TX Women's Health Program in 2013:
https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMsa1511902 https://www.austinchronicle.com/daily/news/2015-03-25/report-thousands-fewer-women-served-by-texas-womens-health-program/

7/Lisa (who I mentioned earlier) has yet to secure a new health care provider. She has a potentially cancerous form of HPV and needs to it monitor w/ regular check ups. The providers in Houston say she'd need to wait up to 6 months for a next appointment.

8/Health providers feel ethically compromised as they are forced by TX to usher patients away from their source of care: “Blocking patients from their trusted providers at this extraordinary time is unthinkably cruel,"- Dr. Bhavik Kumar, med director at PPGulf Coast tells me

9/And this is all happening during an unprecedented public health crisis, where access to health care is doubly vital and finding new access to care is doubly difficult. Providers asked for a 6mo extension, the state gave patients, some of the most vulnerable in TX, just 30 days