Walgreens and Planned Parenthood

Last updated on: January 22, 2016 at 8:11 am by Jane the Actuary

Walgreens and Planned Parenthood 2016-01-22T08:11:25-06:00 Jane the Actuary

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Yes, I know, and odd juxtaposition, but bear with me.

From the Walgreens annual report, p. 5:

The Company’s drugstores are engaged in the retail sale of prescription and non-prescription drugs and general merchandise. General merchandise includes, among other things, convenience and fresh foods, household items, personal care, beauty care, photofinishing and candy. Prescription drugs represent the Company’s largest product class, followed by general merchandise and non-prescription drugs. In fiscal 2014, 2013 and 2012, prescription drugs represented 64%, 63% and 63% of total sales, respectively, general merchandise represented 26%, 27% and 25% of total sales, respectively, and non-prescription drugs represented 10%, 10% and 12% of total sales, respectively.

Of course, if you look at the total square footage in a Walgreens given over to various products, this isn’t what you’d expect. As you make your way over to the pharmacy, you pass the greeting cards, the makeup, the cheap appliances, the junky toys, school supplies, as well as the aforementioned personal care and beauty care (which, as far as I can tell, are not available in any greater selection or any cheaper price than the grocery store).

At the same time, that’s a statistic with respect to total sales. One imagines that the general merchandise is lower in total sales but provides a higher proportion when looked at in terms of profit — after all, the objective is to get you to spend as you walk past all these items on the way to the pharmacy, or while you’re waiting for your prescription to be processed. How much the general merchandise exceeds pharmacy in profitability I don’t know; Crain’s confirms the fact but without actual statistics here:

A second prong of Walgreen’s strategy for boosting profit margins emphasizes nondrug merchandise, known as “front-end sales” in the business. Such goods — the candy bars, shaving cream, nail polish and other sundries found on Walgreen store shelves, including cigarettes — generally carry higher profit margins than drugs.

You see where I’m going with this, don’t you, given the title of this post?

Planned Parenthood repeatedly says that 3% of their services are abortions.* I’ve read in various sources that a part of what they do is count each constituent part of a visit as a different “service” — writing a prescription for pills, birth control counseling, a general gyne exam, etc. But what is Planned Parenthood really, fundamentally, about?

They say “women’s health” — but, as the authors in this National Review symposium point out, sliding-scale community health clinics do a far better job of caring for women’s (and men’s) health.

Planned Parenthood, from its inception, has been about reducing births via contraception and, later, abortion. That’s it’s core competency, if you will. If we imagine that tax money given to them will further women’s health, then we ought, indeed, to be redirecting it to sliding-scale clinics, which, even post-Obamacare, have plenty of clients who can’t afford their deductibles. The health of low-income Americans could be helped greatly if more funds allowed these clinics to expand.

If, on the other hand, the policy goal is to reduce pregnancies, well, then freestanding specialty clinics might be the way to go, in the same way as Third World countries reportedly complain that their clinics are well-stocked with condoms and contraceptive pills but short on antibiotics. (Though, even then, there’s no reason not to require that the abortion business be truly spun off, as Wesley J Smith suggested last week.)

(* I wanted to verify this via their annual report, but they’ve taken their site down “for maintenance.” Reportedly, at least earlier today, they’d been claiming the site was down due to hacking; The Federalist says all evidence points to this being a hoax.)

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