Rural Health Care Access

Rural poor caught in budget war over clinics, By Curt Brown, May 14, 2011, Minneapolis-St. Paul Star Tribune: “Deb Zupke gets both angry and bewildered that the ordinary-looking strip-mall storefront in her hometown has become a target of the budget battles in Washington and St. Paul. Planned Parenthood relocated its clinic to the site just next to the Ace Hardware store in the Belle Mar Mall one year ago. Nearly 5,000 women come from the local university and far-flung farms to visit the four exam rooms, the little lab area and the bland-but-warm reception area every year — just like Zupke and her two older sisters did while growing up on a dairy farm 10 miles west of here. ‘For rural women like us, this was the only place to go for our annual exams and birth control,’ said Zupke, now 27 and pregnant with her first child. ‘Abortion is the first thing that pops into everybody’s mind when they hear Planned Parenthood, and I don’t know why. I know what their real focus is because I was a recipient, and it was my primary care.’ In this and 15 other outstate clinics from Albert Lea to Thief River Falls, nearly 60 percent of Planned Parenthood’s 64,000 Minnesota patients come for Pap smears, breast cancer screenings, infection treatment and birth control. Far beyond offering birth control, the clinics have become the backbone of the public health system in outstate Minnesota, where health-care options are increasingly sparse…”