Clinics Provide a Wide Range of Services in Addition to Family Planning
Overall, about one in six of the 44 million American women who receive contraceptive or other reproductive health care each year (7.4 million women) obtain these services from publicly funded family planning clinics. A sizable proportion of women who rely on clinics for their care are young, unmarried, less-educated or poor. Medicaid recipients and uninsured women, however, are 3-4 times as likely as women with private insurance to obtain reproductive health care from publicly subsidized clinics, according to the findings of a new study, "Public or Private Providers? U.S. Women's Use of Reproductive Health Services," by Jennifer J. Frost of The Alan Guttmacher Institute (AGI). The findings also suggest that women whose primary source of reproductive care is a publicly funded family planning clinic receive a wider range of services than women who visit private providers for reproductive health care; specifically, the former are significantly more likely to receive contraceptive services or STD-related care, even when age, income and race are taken into account.
Indeed, a recent report by AGI, Fulfilling the Promise: Public Policy and U.S. Family Planning Clinics, highlighting the accomplishments of the nation's 7,000 publicly funded family planning clinics, reports that each year, the clinic network
• serves one in four women who obtain birth control from a health care provider;
• serves one in seven women of reproductive age who receive Pap smears and pelvic examinations; and
• accounts for one in four HIV tests and one in three visits for other sexually transmitted disease services among women of reproductive age.
"Public or Private Providers? U.S. Women's Use of Reproductive Health Services," published in the January/February 2001 issue of the Institute's peer-reviewed journal Family Planning Perspectives, is based on data from the 1995 National Survey of Family Growth.
Author Jennifer Frost underscores the vital role that the U.S. family planning clinic network plays in helping women to avoid unintended pregnancies and improving their health. She notes that the demands on these clinics are likely to increase, however, because of escalating costs associated with newer and more effective contraceptive methods and state-of-the-art medical technology, the growing numbers of uninsured women in America, and a desire on the part of many family planning providers to offer wider range of women's reproductive health services, including HIV-related care, even as they also reach out to men. She further comments, "These clinics are currently struggling financially to provide the high-quality family planning and related health services for which they have been known. Policymakers need to consider these increasing demands and costs when allocating public dollars for these programs."