Planned Parenthood, heeding President Barack Obama's call to promote the healthcare-reform law, is creating a website to help explain coverage options and is training its staff to help educate women about the enrollment process.
According to Politico, the group's more than 750 clinics around the country also will put up posters and hand out pamphlets, detailing coverage options prior to enrollment beginning on Oct. 1.
The organization also will apply for federal Obamacare grants to help patients enroll and choose their coverage.
"We've already started now, in anticipation of the law, doing a number of things to try to make ourselves available as a resource to them," Jon Dunn, president and CEO of Planned Parenthood of Orange and San Bernardino counties in California, told Politico.
Some of the organization's affiliate clinics will be applying to become official "navigators," government-funded positions that allow them to provide more hands-on assistance through the signup process.
"We hope to get some of those assister or navigator grant funds,” said Dunn. "If not, we've decided that we're going to help our patients with this information anyway."
But while Planned Parenthood is doing what it can to promote Obamacare to its more than 3 million patients, half of whom are uninsured, Republicans in Congress will be doing all they can to kill funding for the organization.
"Planned Parenthood is among the long list of liberal organizations that are expected to receive taxpayer-funded navigator grants. The navigator grants would further enable Planned Parenthood, the largest abortion provider in America, to continue its misuse of taxpayer dollars to [supplement] their big abortion business," Rep. Diane Black told Politico.
The Tennessee Republican said she wants to eliminate the navigator program, which is expected to cost $54 million, because it's "ripe for fraud and abuse."
Former Colorado Rep. Marilyn Musgrave, who now works with the anti-abortion group Susan B. Anthony List, agreed, telling Politico, "Of course, Planned Parenthood wants to see this law implemented. It will just put more money in their coffers."
In April, Obama became the first incumbent president to address Planned Parenthood’s national conference, calling on the organization to help promote the healthcare-reform law.
“We’ve got to spread the word, particularly among women, particularly among young women, who are the ones who are most likely to benefit from these laws," he told the conference. "We need all the women who come through your doors telling their children, their husbands, and their folks in their neighborhoods about their healthcare options . . . You are all in a unique position to deliver that message, because the women you serve know you and they trust you."