A former manager of a Planned Parenthood facility in Iowa said the organisation was more focused "about its bottom line than it is about the health and safety of women."
Sue Thayer said she worked at Planned Parenthood for 17 years and first managed the Heartland's Storm Lake facility and then the Lamars facility until she was fired in 2008. She then decided to become a whistleblower.
In a hearing on Thursday before the US House of Representatives Judiciary Committee, Thayer said, "As an adoptive parent of three children and a foster mother of 130, I did not fit well into Planned Parenthood's corporate culture."
"But I believed the message that by working at Planned Parenthood I could help reduce abortion and serve women. I was wrong," she said, according to Christian News Network.
She said the facilities did not perform abortions until 2007 when Planned Parenthood began webcam abortions.
"The plan was to make every Iowa clinic into an abortion clinic by having a doctor in a remote location talk to the woman by video," she said. "They solved the problem of needing to determine gestational age of the unborn child by having non-medical staff perform ... ultrasounds with minimal training. In response to our concerns, the project manager, Todd Buhacker, told us, 'If you are breathing, you can do this. It helps if you've played a video game. It's just like running a joystick.'"
She said, "We were told to tell women who experienced complications at home to report to the ER and just say they were having a miscarriage. This avoided attention from the local medical community when we would be outsourcing complications to others."
Thayer claimed that in addition, she saw how the organisation used Medicaid funds for abortions and over-reported costs of contraceptives to make money off taxpayers' funds.
"Planned Parenthood has a negotiated price of $2.98 per cycle of birth control pills. But in Iowa and many other states they are allowed to bill Medicaid at the high rate of $35, receiving over $26 in reimbursement every month," she said. "This made birth control a high profit margin item for us and we were required to increase birth control billings."
"Because I had access to the billing system for the whole affiliate, I also know that Planned Parenthood would bill Medicaid for abortion-related services – ultrasounds, office visits, blood tests, medications, and other services that were part of an abortion," she said, adding that these billings for abortion-related services have been found by government auditors in New York and Washington.
She said Planned Parenthood asked women to pay part of their bill but then wrote it off as a donation since Medicaid covered the entire charges.
"We were ... told to ask, 'How much are you planning to pay today? Will that be cash or credit?' Nearly all clients made some payment of $10 or more either during a visit or later by mail. Planned Parenthood counted those payments as voluntary donations and billed the full amount to Medicaid," she said.
She said the organisation earned over $700 million in excess revenues and its officials live lavishly.
"Planned Parenthood is more concerned about its bottom line than it is about the health and safety of women," she said.
