Sue Thayer testified before Congress on Oct. 8 about the abuses she witnessed while working for Planned Parenthood as its center manager in Storm Lake and LeMars, Iowa, clinics for 17 years.

After leaving Planned Parenthood in 2008, she blew the whistle on the organization’s Medicaid billing practices, filing a false claims act lawsuit. It alleges that Planned Parenthood filed false claims for $28 million with Iowa’s Medicaid program for illegally dispensing “medically unnecessary” quantities of oral contraceptives and birth control patches to Medicaid patients, doing so without a prescription, for fraudulently billing the Iowa Medicaid program for abortion-related services and coercing “donations” from Medicaid patients.

Planned Parenthood has a negotiated price of $2.98 per cycle of birth control pills. In Iowa and many other states, it is allowed to bill Medicaid for $35, receiving more than $26 in reimbursement every month. With such a high profit margin, Planned Parenthood required staff to increase birth control billings. In addition to filling prescriptions without prescriptions, leadership implemented a “C-Mail program,” by which birth control pills were mailed automatically.

If pills were returned as undeliverable or refused, Planned Parenthood just resent them and rebilled Medicaid. Because Thayer had access to the billing system for the whole affiliate, she knew Planned Parenthood also billed Medicaid for abortion-related services — ultrasounds, office visits, blood tests, medications and other services that were part of an abortion.

Even though Medicaid was billed in full, Planned Parenthood trained clinic staff to ask even their low-income clients to pay 50 percent of the bill. Planned Parenthood recently has been audited in nine states, with all nine showing overbilling.

Why are U.S. taxpayers forced to pay $500 million annually to this criminal organization?

Additional testimony can be found at LifeNews.com.

Ron Stauble Sr.

Unity