California lawmakers revive early abortion provider bill
By Jeremy B. White, Sacramento Bee
More medical professionals, including nurses and midwives, would be permitted to perform certain early abortions in California under a bill unveiled Tuesday.
In a news conference at the Capitol that served to both introduce the bill and mark the 40-year anniversary of the Supreme Court’s landmark Roe v. Wade decision, lawmakers and women’s health advocates said the measure is necessary for women in communities without abortion providers.
They said 52 percent of California counties do not contain a provider, other than hospitals, which often have only limited services.
“California will not go back. We are going to go forward,” said Sen. Hannah-Beth Jackson, D-Santa Barbara. “And we are doing that by making sure that reproductive health care, that abortion services are available to every woman, to make sure that we all have access, whether we live in rural areas or urban centers, whether or not we are able to afford the procedure or whether we require assistance.”
Assembly Bill 154 by Assemblywoman Toni Atkins, D-San Diego, would revive last year’s push to expand abortion access by allowing nurse practitioners to perform nonsurgical early abortions.
Gov. Jerry Brown ultimately signed a diluted version of the bill that allowed only non-doctor clinicians trained through a specific pilot program to perform the procedure. The bill extended that program, jointly administered by the Office of Statewide Health Planning and Development and UC San Francisco, until Jan. 1, 2014.
The California Nurses Association opposed the initial version of last year’s bill, saying it would be premature to expand beyond a pilot program before researchers at UC San Francisco completed a multiyear study. The organization also had concerns about providing proper training and ensuring that the bill provided for an early first-trimester technique.
That landscape has changed now that UC San Francisco has completed its study and seen the results published in the American Journal of Public Health, Amy Everitt, state director of NARAL Pro-Choice America, said at the rally.
The study concluded that trained nurse practitioners, physician assistants and certified nurse midwives could safely perform early abortions.
The nurses association is pleased that the study has been completed but is still developing its position on the bill, said Bonnie Castillo, government relations director. She said the organization has already held “productive” meetings with the bill’s sponsors aimed at clarifying some of the bill’s language.
“We anticipate that’s going to be achievable, but right now we believe that it’s just a process,” Castillo said.
That is grotesque. This is what our new statist medical system is going to bring. Pretty soon the woman answering the phone in the front office will be doing your procedures for the sake of expediency.
Dogula, what is “statist medical system?
For your information, midwives are presently authorized to deliver infants and medical tech can preform certain functions.
Non-surgical abortions require no surgical room visit and are either chemically induced abortions or aspiration procedure and usually within the first few days of conception.
If you have had cause to spend any time in a hospital for any procedure (for me I have had some knee surgery and herniated a disc in my back in May – treated non surgically treated, but extremely painful for the first couple of weeks) you find that nurses and medical techs do most of the non-surgical procedures anyway (drawing blood, medications, etc.) and the Dr is only there briefly.
Based on the research by UCSF, this is a safe strategy that is an efficient use of medical personnel. So why would we not look for ways to provide treatment in a cost-effective manner?
Rick
Grotesque is the return to the coat hanger world of Ayn Rand and her toadies.
I was referring to the future of American medical care, not specifically to abortion.
When medical care is “free” and provided by your government, which IS the ultimate goal here, do not pretend it isn’t, there won’t be enough doctors to provide the services. You WILL have unqualified people providing substandard (by current mores) care. You all think the UK system is awesome? Take a closer look.
Dog, in the UK me having a knee surgery, heart surgery, brain tumor removed, means I don’t have to worry about my house being taken away because I had crap insurance or NONE. And that is bad because?
And then there is the fact that you can still purchase private insurance in the UK… but we can’t let those facts get in the way of ideology.
Our healthcare system is a failure by all measures.
And Dog, aren’t you retired military? Or so you have insinuated. Wouldn’t that put you on government provided health care? And instead of arguing to make it better, you want to abolish it?
Our healthcare system is a failure by all measures??? Really??? You’re still alive, aren’t you? I survived cancer. I think we have the finest, most innovative medical care in the world. Why else do people come from other countries for treatment of difficult cases? But that IS changing, isn’t it?
Glad you all are happy it’s going into the crapper. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.
You can lead a man to knowledge, but you can’t make him think.
Dogula: Our health care system is a failure by any reasonable measures. We pay about 17% of our GDP in health care cost while the rest of the industrialized world is closer to 8%. We rank 34th in the world in important health metrics (e.g., infant mortality rates, average life span, etc.). So while we have some good medical schools and Drs, we are absolutely crappy at delivering affordable health care in an effective manner.
If we scored higher then the rest of the world (and we aren’t even close) in health metrics, then you might say, well we pay more for better – in reality we pay more for less. If you would read something other than the conservative blogs, you would know this and you would know many of the factors of why are overall care is poor.
Rick
Dogula:
Another point, the UK system spends considerably less and the Brits score much higher on health metrics then we do. By a lot. So who is better off?
Rick
“Our healthcare system is a failure by all measures???”
Yes. Pick one. Compare our country to all other developed nations.
Infant mortality.
Life expectancy.
Deaths from preventable disease.
Bankruptcy due to health care costs.
Most importantly, per capita GDP expenditure on health care. We pay a lot more, and get a lot less.
To you that is…. acceptable?
“You can lead a man to knowledge, but you can’t make him think.”
Oh the irony. You are using a computer, with internet access.
There is no excuse for the level of ignorance you display on a daily basis. None. In less than 5 minutes you could look at all of the healthcare metrics for every country you can think of. And you never have. In the amount of time you have spent today expressing your misinformed position on healthcare you could have gained knowledge.
Do you want to quantify this discussion and start comparing the data?
This took me about 90 seconds (it is going to take me longer to copy and paste the data here)
http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=US+per+capita+helath+care+spending+vs+UK
query: US per capita helath care spending vs UK
results
US: $7291
UK: $2996
Fraction of GDP
US: 16%
UK: 8.42%
Another: Infant mortality
http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=US+infant+mortality+vs+UK
US: .00626
UK: .00485
Life expectancy:
http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=US+life+expectancy+vs+UK
US: 78.1
UK: 79
All of the information in the world at your finger tips and you choose to ignore it. That is your choice, but don’t get all bent out of shape when people correctly label you as ignorant.
Figures lies and liars figure.
Who needs that worthless blob of protoplasm anyway.
Joe:
Your comments are indicative of the rights war with science and math.
You are who Don Quixote must have been thinking of when he quipped in the Musical Man of La Mancha, “Facts are the Enemy of Truth”.
The most poignant example of this was during the election, where right wing pundits poo pood math and the predictive models from the poll aggregaters such as Nate Silver, and predicted that Romney would win and in most cases they predicted handily. Need I remind you, Romney was defeated by 5 million votes and lost in a electoral college landslide.
The results were not at all surprising to Nate Silver because he predicted all house, senate and the presidential election, save one (North Dakota democrat won the senate and Nate Silver’s model had given him only an 8% chance of winning). In the end, math and statistics won out.
The republicans (and conservative pundits) hated the math not because they had identified flaws in his models (because they did not), but because it actually showed them loosing and they simply did not believe it could be so. They did not evaluate Silver’s models (or the other poll agragaters who had tremendous predictive success – though Silver’s proved to the most accurate), they simply deemed their ouija board as more powerful – WRONG.
So while Silver’s models are quite complex and he spent years honing these models based on past polling data to find out the inherent biases in the various polling companies – the health statistics are pretty simple and there for all to see. How much is spent in each country and the cost per GDP is factual and it does not look good for the U.S.
You may remember Mitt Romney praising Israel’s health care system as only running 8% of GDP, then he found out later that Israel has a classic sociologist health care system; not at all like we adopted which relies on existing for profit companies.
Health metrics are pretty clear, we do really poorly with the money we spend. If you choose to ignore facts, then you merely are the poster child of what is wrong with the republican party. It was not always that way – many in the party were in fact champions of evidence (for example, Dave Packard, Bill Hewlett, the great wildlife ecologist Starker Leopold son of Aldo, and the list goes on and on)- sorry to see the party loose its way.
Rick
You calling me a liar Joe?
Without anything to support your claim?
Not sure if lazy, or coward….
Dougla, BLAH BLAH BLAH. You are so ignorant
The dumb thing is: we have known from statistics for some time that our healthcare costs more than other countries, has worse outcomes, and yet we do nothing about it, except pat ourselves on the back for being the best healthcare system when we are not. Maybe we are for a select few that are private pay, but we don’t measure health care sucess by a select few.
Personally I dread everytime I have to access the system, as I have no idea of what charges I will acrue, and I have insurance!
Most people in this country are one illness away from financial catastrophe :(
thingfish, thanks for prodding me to stop being lazy and not using the resources available to actually answer questions. I just looked at some comparisons of doctors’ compensation worldwide and found that the pay is a whole lot higher here in the US. Others would call that “overpaid”, but not me.
Source: Congressional Research Service analysis
You can thank government interference into the insurance industry and medical care for the massive confusion and inflation of costs.
If you were old enough to remember what going to the doctor and paying those bills was like a mere 30 years ago, you’d know that it has only been like this since the states started regulating exactly how and what insurance companies must cover. Back in the old days, if you wanted insurance, you could choose a policy based on what YOU thought would be best for yourself. It’s not that way anymore.
We have been legislated into a chaotic system that serves NOBODY well.
Dogula: You have not a clue. For example, the health care cost for my company went up over 100% from 2007 to 2011, that is not gov interference, but private companies jacking the cost up because we do nothing to control cost. We spend phenomenal cost (several times more then most countries) on the last few months of life. We do very poorly in working on preventative care – in fact a number of procedures that are considered prevented are not covered by many health care providers.
No we are not legislated to death, in fact we have let companies not cover people, deny people with pre-existing conditions and not cover procedures Drs. believe are important, and they do not cover normal preventative visits. All the things that are covered in 34 industrialized countries better and far cheaper then us.
We do poorly because we have allowed for profit companies to dictate what constitute good health care and all they have succeeding in doing is making boat loads of money while costing the U.S. populous huge amounts of money for poorer care.
So what do you not get, that the rest of the industrialized world spends about half of what we do and provide way better care. They have way more government involvement then we do, yet do way better. So your suggestion that it is gov that is the problem has not evidence to back it up.
Rick
Sorry Rick. I’m not the one who is clueless. This is something I’ve been watching for a long time. Government IS the problem here. Individual states up till 3 years ago were the problem. Now it is the feds.
We used to purchase catastrophic coverage for a very affordable price and pay our every day doctor visits out of pocket. Very manageable. Little by little the states started legislating that the insurance plans MUST all cover psychiatric care. Whether I wanted it or not. Well, it ain’t free, so the premium goes up. Then it was free annual visit required. That isn’t actually free either. Every time the state legislated something else, guess who pays?? And consequently, with all the different insurance companies coming out with all their diffferent rules, doctors offices needed to increase their staffs to deal with all the associated paperwork! More expenses!
And yeah, the state did not legislate that insurance companies had to accept preexisting conditions. Insurance companies made them realize that would be suicide. Why would anybody pay gobs of money for insurance all along if they could just wait till they got sick to buy it? Insurance companies and government surely have a symbiotic relationship that they did not have 40 years ago. I’ve watched it happen. It stinks.
Do you actually think obama’s plan (requiring everybody to buy insurance whether they want it or not) will weaken that stranglehold?
When was the last time you won an argument or convinced someone to listen to your viewpoint by demeaning them? Sixth grade? Sad to see politics affect people’s ability to reason.
Not sure toward whom you are speaking, dumbfounded. This thread has 8 different posters!
I refer to anyone who doesn’t make a comment without some nasty invective. We all do it to some extent, but I am personally trying to be part of the solution by thinking about what I write before I hit that “Submit Comment” button. It gives me a chance to check my spelling too. Of course, I still make mistakes. We can be respectful and still disagree, IMHO. More importantly, my point was that respectful communications are more effective than disrespectful communications.