Indiana has lost its battle to deny Medicaid funds to Planned Parenthood clinics (at least unless the judge's ruling is overrturned. And let's not have anybody kidding themselves about what it means:
Indiana had sought to prevent Medicaid enrollees from accessing health care at clinics operated by Planned Parenthood of Indiana and Kentucky because the organization provides abortions.
[. . .]
Indiana Attorney General Greg Zoeller issued a statement saying “it was important and necessary to defend the policy decision of the people’s elected representatives in the Legislature that Medicaid dollars should not indirectly subsidize the payroll and overhead expenses of abortion providers. “
If it makes anybody feel better that tax money is only indirectly subsidizing abortion, because it's used only for Planned Parenthood services other than abortion, fine. But money spent there frees up money that would have been spent there, so that money is freed up to provide abortion services. Taxpayers are therefore helping pay for abortions whether they want to or not.
Now, whether whether abortions should be denied federal funding because 51 percent of Americans think they should be is another debate entirely. Letting people pick and choose where their tax money goes is not exactly how a representative democracy is designed to work. As regular readers know, there are scads and scads of things I don't want to be funding with my tax dollars. It'd be nice if some kind bureaucrat would sit down with me and make a list of things to defund, but I ain't expecting that phone call.
