As reported by the blog Abortion In Washington, the city of Longview, in southwest Washington, kicked Planned Parenthood out of their town because the group was only interested in making money -- in stark contrast to their much touted 'non-profit' image -- and also because the Longview commissioners realized that PP wasn't willing or able to provide the long-term doctor-patient relationships which are part of a proper approach to health care. Wrote AIW:
... [Planned Parenthood of Western Washington] kept asking for more and more money from the county ... and then insisted on offering their high-margin services which the county wasn’t interested in, e.g., birth control, emergency contraception.
Much like Franklin County, Cowlitz County was dealing with an STD outbreak and a significant uptick in teen pregnancy rates. They were looking for a health care provider that would be focussed on those areas, including both prevention and care.
Despite the public image it has so successfully cultivated, PPWW was not sufficiently interested in providing services with that focus, said Commissioner Johnson. She also said they wanted a provider which would care for pregnant women the traditional way, i.e., helping both patients, the mother and the unborn child. As PPWW spokesman Brian Cutler told us in a previous interview, “if a woman plans to keep her baby, she’s probably not going to come to Planned Parenthood.”
Finally, Longview officials realized that good health care involves long-term relationships between primary care physicians and patients, not 'one-day stands' with out-of-town medical staff, churning through patients, doling out birth control like fast food:
Carlos Carreon, director of the Cowlitz County Public Health Department, ... [said] that after months of ultimately fruitless discussions with PPWW, it just struck him that there was a much better way to provide residents with high quality health care.
“It was sort of an ‘Oh-duh’ moment,” he said frankly. Instead of "trying so hard to fit a square peg in a round hole", he realized it would make far more sense to partner with the Family Health Center, a local non-profit health care provider with full-time M.D’s and R.N’s to serve as the clients’ primary care providers and able to establish a long-term medical relationship.
This contrasts with PPWW’s clinic which would parachute an R.N. once a week from upstate to walk-in clients without any long-term relationship. (Finding a local R.N. willing to work full-time for Planned Parenthood was proving impossible.) “This was just a superior model of care,” he explained.
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