Guttmacher Study Released Today: Family Planning Saves Money
A new report released by the Guttmacher Institute today provides ample evidence that publicly funded family planning services are much-needed and extremely cost-effective.
According to the report, publicly funded family planning services prevent 1.94 million unintended pregnancies each year. Not only are these services improving quality of life, they are also saving taxpayer dollars. For every dollar put into family planning programs, $4.02 is saved in Medicaid funds that would otherwise be spent on pregnancy-related care. Even with these great strides, many women still do not have access to services due to lack of resources. Unintended pregnancies among low-income women have started to rise at the same time that they are decreasing in other groups.
The majority of family planning programs are publicly funded, with over 9 million clients receiving publicly funded contraceptive services in 2006. Increasing Medicaid family planning coverage and updating Title X policies is a necessary step for more women to have access to these services.
The report calls for a national floor of family planning coverage to fill in the gaps in state programs. The effect would be an additional 800,000 prevented unintended pregnancies, overall saving $2.6 billion in Medicaid costs.
Recognizing the savings associated with the program, 21 states have chosen to expand eligibility for family planning for low-income women who otherwise would not qualify for Medicaid. However, in order to do so, states must first go through a time-consuming process to get a federal waiver, and a proposal to eliminate this cumbersome red tape was unfortunately dropped from the economic stimulus package last month after adamant Republican opposition.
While highlighting the effectiveness of the program, the authors point to a number of policy changes that could help further increase its value. In addition to eliminating the waiver requirement, they recommend lifting a ban on family planning coverage for legal immigrants in their first five years in the United States and increasing funding for the Title X program, the main federal family planning program.
A proposal to increase—perhaps even double—Title X funding is already pending in Congress. Hopefully, armed with this evidence from Guttmacher, advocates for women’s health will have no trouble pushing through such a cost-effective proposal. As one of the report’s authors notes, “Family planning should be noncontroversial.”
Download the full report here.
By Monika Grzeniewski and Maya Dusenbery