As the federal government continues to explore changes to access to reproductive healthcare across the country, Upper Hudson Planned Parenthood is set to begin managing sexual and reproductive health services in Saratoga County by 2028.
The consolidation will aim to bring expanded services to the region on a more regular basis. Southern Adirondack Bureau Chief Aaron Shellow-Lavine spoke with the organization’s CEO and President Chelly Hegan about the effort.
We have been working in partnership with Planned Parenthood of Greater New York, who is currently offering services one day per week in Saratoga, and they will continue to do that throughout this transition.
But for the sort of long-term sustainability of services in Saratoga, we are getting ready to find a new location, build a new health center, and offer a full service health center there five days a week in hopefully beginning of 2028. So, it'll take us about a year to raise the money and find a location, but we are confident we're going to be able to do that, and we're really, really excited.
New York is one of those states that very vehemently defends the access to a lot of the services that are provided by Planned Parenthood. Even with that sort of being the reality, what are some of the roadblocks and barriers to people accessing reproductive health care?
Well, I mean, healthcare is difficult in rural communities everywhere, and in New York, that is no different. I think that the ongoing attacks by the this administration on core Planned Parenthood services, and actually also the patients that we serve, Meaning, low-income people, new Americans, and people of color, that and and transgender people. Those attacks are relentless, and so there's always a challenge in providing care across the state. Here in the Capital Region, we have been really fortunate to be able to maintain and grow our presence in Albany, Troy, and Hudson, and we're really hopeful that we'll be able to do that in Saratoga as well. As far as the rest of the state goes, everybody's got different challenges. The North Country has its own challenges with rural healthcare delivery. The Planned Parenthood of Greater New York has health centers all over in various parts of the state, and each community is really its own entity. It's easy to look at Planned Parenthood services across the country and have and walk away with one single impression, just like it is the state of New York. But one of the things Upper Hudson has always done is remained very hyper local, and the challenges we face in Albany are different than the challenges we face in Troy, and are different than the challenges we face in Hudson. And we know that they're different than the challenges we will face in Saratoga. But we're really committed to care that is based in community, rooted in community and designed to serve communities,
As we see rural healthcare providers, not just reproductive healthcare, but at large, rural hospitals are are going through it. That's just how things are right now. How do you see that impacting what you guys are doing here, sort of in a little bit more of an accessible area, the Capital Region. Are you seeing folks coming from more rural communities? You making a bit of that trip. I'm not even talking out of state, but just from deeper, into even Western New York.
We do see people from across the state. It's very hard to specifically drill down as to why they're coming. The Capital Region is a place where people from all over the state come for college, they come for graduate school and law school, and they come to work in state government. So we have people here from across the state for a wide variety of reasons, and I can't necessarily say what's causing that. But even within the counties that we serve, we have there have been challenges at Columbia Memorial Hospital and discontinuing delivery services at that hospital that has made that has had a huge effect on that community and the way in which they look for care here in I live in Troy, so I say here because I happen to be sitting in Troy, but here in Troy we have seen the potential of discontinuing midwife services at their birthing center, and that is based on economic challenges that Trinity Health has faced. We know that there are commitments in Saratoga at the Saratoga Hospital, but the rural hospitals are really struggling. And by rural, we have to remember that that's almost everything in Saratoga County except for Saratoga and Clifton Park, and here in Rensselaer County, that's everything in Rensselaer County except for the city of Rensselaer and the city of Troy. So, all of the counties that we serve have these sort of like small city populations, and then the rest of the county is extremely rural.
When we talk about birthing units at local hospitals, we're not even talking about rural hospitals. We're talking about in Hudson, potentially in Troy. For you, in your role at Planned Parenthood, what kind of flashing alarms does that set off for you when when we start to see that trend reach even here in the Capital Region?
It's deeply troubling. Now we provide a full range of reproductive health care, but we do not do labor and delivery, and so we have to partner with other providers in our community in order to make sure that pregnant and parenting people have access to the care they need and a place to to deliver their babies. So it is part of the continuity of care for many of our patients. It is deeply troubling, and we have been very active in some of the work in protest of that discontinuation in Rensselaer County. It was very difficult when we found out that they weren't going to have deliveries in Columbia County. The reality for those hospitals is that the number of babies that they were delivering was so low that it also starts to jeopardize the safety of care. So, it is a problem for the hospitals too. They're not always the enemy. It isn't that the hospitals are trying to do something. It is a kind of a coming together of rural populations not accessing care in their local communities, and then the less they access care, the less safe that care becomes because it's done fewer and fewer times. So, in Columbia County, they made what was a reasonable decision, and yet it has far ranging implications for people who are living there and want to deliver their baby in their hometown.
What are you guys, as an organization, advocating for within the Capital Region to try and reinforce what services we do currently have and would ideally like to keep here?
The thing that would make the biggest difference for us in all of the services we provide is a real attention to the Medicaid reimbursement rates because we we can fill a lot of gaps. We provide everything from behavioral health care, contraceptive care, cancer screenings, menopause care, abortion care, transgender services-all of these services are incredibly important and very low reimbursement rates, which makes it harder and harder to deliver more and more care because we have the ever increasing cost of providing care, from staffing costs to supply costs to cybersecurity and all of all of the other things that go into providing care. But the reimbursement rates for those services has remained flat for almost my entire tenure, and I've been working at Upper Hudson for 20 years.
What are we seeing as far as trickle-down from the federal crackdowns and restrictions on reproductive health care impacting a service that you guys provide in a state that again has codified protections for a lot of what Planned Parenthood does? What are we seeing as as that trickle down effect?
I always feel very fortunate to live in New York because every time there have been direct attacks, so everything from the overturning of Roe v. Wade all the way through defunding Planned Parenthood from the Medicaid system on a federal level, the state has stepped up immediately in terms of protecting access to care for people who live here in the state. So we have seen the state respond, but the trickle down is that money has to come from somewhere, and so while the state has remained very committed to the care that we provide, and candidly, it isn't nearly as expensive as some of the other challenges that the state is going to be facing when it comes to the deterioration of the federal commitment to Medicaid. Those challenges all end up going somewhere. So what might get a patch that can go here could end up with a leak over here, and then someone else's losses over here can add to somebody else's problems here. So the entire healthcare system is all very interconnected, and here in New York, we have a strong commitment, and yet that commitment has a cost.
I think something you mentioned earlier, where communities that are already struggling with access to reproductive health care, and communities that, like you like you mentioned, newly citizens and communities of color, so on and so forth, where healthcare can sometimes be a challenge. How is this new location in Saratoga County addressing that? Beyond this new Saratoga County expansion, what are you guys looking to try and shore up some of those gaps?
I am only at the very beginning of learning and understanding what Saratoga is all about. We are going to spend the next year really getting to know the community, getting to talk to people, and identifying where where there are gaps that we think we're best suited to fill. I think that answer is going to get more and more interesting as the year goes by. But right now, I would say that Saratoga, much like the other counties that we serve, has an urban population, or and then a suburban population and a rural population, all of whom are going to have very distinct and specific needs when it comes to what kind of reproductive health care services they want to access and how. And we are going to continue to look at ways to provide that. We are very grateful for our partnership with Planned Parenthood of Greater New York because they are going to continue to operate a full-service health center in Saratoga one day a week throughout this entire transition. So, unlike some places where there's zero care and a Planned Parenthood is trying to come in and build a new center. At least we know that the community is getting some services right now, and that that is a really fortunate place to be.
