Washington, D.C. – U.S. Senators Catherine Cortez Masto (D-Nev.) and Jacky Rosen (D-Nev.) sent a letter to Secretary Xavier Becerra of the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) hailing the administration’s decision to revoke the harmful Title X provisions implemented under the Trump Administration, which Senators Cortez Masto and Rosen condemned. Trump had severely impacted rural Nevadans’ access to care by limiting the types of health care providers who could provide family planning counseling and referrals.
“As you know, over the last 50 years the Title X Family Planning Program has provided critical family planning services to more than 190 million people in low-income and underserved communities,” wrote the senators. “Each year millions of vulnerable patients rely on Title X grantees and the networks they fund for cancer screenings, preventive health services, and contraceptive counseling and care that many would be unable to access anywhere else.”
“In Nevada, more than two thirds of the state’s Title X funds in 2019 – 70 percent – were distributed to state and local health departments. Among the state’s small, rural health departments, counseling services are mostly conducted by registered nurses who were barred from offering those services under the 2019 Rule,” the senators continued. “…This directly impacted our frontier areas that are heavily reliant on public health infrastructure for health care access.”
“We urge you to finalize the proposed rule to increase access to care in our nation’s rural and underserved areas by including registered nurses and public health nurses as providers who are able to provide nondirective counselling and referrals under the title X programs,” the senators concluded.
The full text of the letter can be found here.
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