The affiliate has also started offering nitrous oxide, or laughing gas, for pain management during procedures like intrauterine device insertions and a telehealth perimenopausal care program, and it is exploring offering GLP-1 medication for weight loss. Those services, too, could help pad out its finances, as some patients, depending on their insurance plans, would pay for them in cash, Dr. Dalton said.
Like Mar Monte, other affiliates have tried to think outside the box with their business models with an eye toward revenue generation, Ms. Vasquez-Giroux said, pointing to the addition at some centers of vasectomies, gender-affirming care and menopause care.
But some affiliates, in doing the math, decided to close clinics. Last year, affiliates in the Planned Parenthood Federation closed 50 of 600 clinics, including the location in Manhattan and five centers in the Mar Monte affiliate.
Planned Parenthood Mar Monte is not the first health care provider to offer cosmetic procedures to bring in more patients. The broader health care industry, faced with the same treacherous landscape as Planned Parenthood, has long been inching into these more cash-padded spaces because they get people in the door, said Felicity Yost, the chief executive of Tia Clinics, a women’s health care company that operates 11 clinics around the country and, 18 months ago, introduced cosmetic Botox services.
Those who hesitate to come in for preventive care might instead come in for something with immediate results, like a cosmetic procedure or acupuncture, and forge a relationship with the clinic, Ms. Yost said, making it more likely they would agree to other types of health care. Essentially: Come for the Botox, stay for the pap smears.
But there was something particularly dissonant about introducing cosmetic procedures, Ms. Yost said, because it seemed to suggest to patients that they needed to be beautified, which initially felt like an “antithetical message” for a clinic focused on women’s health.