Suehs (HHS Commissioner) responds angrily to Planned Parenthood activists
Tom Suehs, the state’s health and human services commissioner, responded with frustration this week to a couple of emails he received from supporters of Planned Parenthood over the funding of a health-care program for women.
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Planned Parenthood encouraged members to send Suehs an email telling him to “stop playing politics with women’s health.” And according to emails obtained by the American-Statesman, the commissioner responded to a couple of them.
“Are you for real? Who is paying your bills?” Suehs wrote to one woman.
Stephanie Goodman, a spokeswoman for the Health and Human Services Commission, confirmed that the email was from Suehs and said his response was inappropriate.
http://www.statesman.com/blogs/content/shared-gen/blogs/austin/politics/entries/2012/03/02/suehs_responds_angrily_to_plan.html
In an email to another woman he responded, “Being refreed (sic?) for fraud.”
= new reply since forum marked as read
Pardon my French. 
what a f'ing pig. 
This is probably an appointed position right? So he's one of Perry and the right wings point men, so of course he's crazy. And a woman hater too.
Related story from the Austin Chronicle:
Another State Assault on Women's Health Care
New state rule targets Planned Parenthood, cuts almost 200,000 women from basic health care
Last Thursday, Feb. 23, Texas Health and Human Services Executive Commissioner Tom Suehs approved a new agency rule that would ban Planned Parenthood from participation in the Women's Health Program – a move that, based on federal standards, most likely means the end to a successful program that in 2010 alone provided more than 180,000 low-income Texas women with access to basic health care and family-planning services.
The WHP is a Medicaid-waiver program that offers basic preventative health and family-planning care to low-income and uninsured women ages 18-44 who, unless pregnant, wouldn't otherwise be eligible for Medicaid. It was devised as a way to provide needy women with health care and to reduce the number of unintended pregnancies paid for by Medicaid – a goal that health care providers say also reduces the number of abortions.
Reducing Medicaid-paid births in Texas is no small thing. More than half of the state's births are paid for by Medicaid – in 2009 alone, Medicaid births cost $2.7 billion. The WHP is paid for by a 90-10 match from the federal government: For every state dollar, the feds contribute $9. The WHP has grown quickly, from 91,683 women served in 2007 to 183,537 in 2010. (The final numbers for 2011 aren't yet in, but HHSC has estimated that they rose yet again.)
