When Planned Parenthood Federation of America president Cecile Richards described 2011 as “the most difficult year in Planned Parenthood’s history,” I wondered if she meant difficult as compared to the nearly $500 million in profit the organization had amassed the year before.
That profit mostly came from U.S. taxpayer-dollars at a time when millions of Americans were out of work. Or maybe it was in contrast to the $1 billion dollars in net asset value that Planned Parenthood also achieved in 2009-2010?
But looking further, things just didn’t add up. And I knew things couldn’t be as bad as Richards said they were, because it was just two months ago that Planned Parenthood plopped down $35 million for a swanky 192,000 square foot building to use for its headquarters in New York City.
And who can forget their brand-new seven-floor, 78,000 square foot late-term-abortion IKEA-sized facility they’ve opened in Houston?
Then I remembered all the waste, abuse and potential fraud associated with Planned Parenthood. Maybe that’s what Richards was talking about when she called this a difficult year!
For example, a report the Alliance Defense Fund recently released in conjunction with the Susan B. Anthony List highlights federal and state audits that identify some of the waste, abuse and potential fraud committed by Planned Parenthood — to the tune of nearly $100 million taxpayer dollars.
The details of the audits are startling, inasmuch as they show Planned Parenthood’s misuse of the massive amounts of taxpayer money that’s been funneled to state family planning programs and Planned Parenthood affiliates.
They include 10 state audits revealing waste and abuse totaling nearly $8 million, and 38 federal audits that uncovered $88-99 million of waste and abuse in “family planning” programs.
Two of these audits, in New York and New Jersey, specifically identified Planned Parenthood, and only Planned Parenthood, as a source of overbilling in the family planning programs; the combined waste in these two audits alone was more than $1.5 million.
But it gets worse. Now, a newly unsealed ADF lawsuit against one of Planned Parenthood’s Texas affiliates has revealed that Planned Parenthood submitted “repeated false, fraudulent, and ineligible claims for Medicaid reimbursements” through the Texas Women’s Health Program. The lawsuit alleges that Planned Parenthood received more than $5.7 million from these false claims.
Think about it — Planned Parenthood gets nearly half a billion dollars each year in annual taxpayer-funded bailouts, and still it wants more. And apparently they want it bad enough to cheat the system to get it.
And if Planned Parenthood’s recent tantrum over Susan G. Komen’s $680,000 in grant funding that the abortion giant assumed it was entitled to wasn’t bad enough, just imagine how taxpayers will react when they find out Planned Parenthood has milked the system for millions to fund its own personal stimulus plan.
Planned Parenthood has deceived women and girls and cheated the American taxpayer for far too long. It’s time to hold it accountable for every penny of our hard-earned tax dollars.
Catherine Glenn Foster is litigation counsel with the Alliance Defense Fund.
