Supreme Court Allows States to Cut Off Medicare Funds to Planned Parenthood

In a 6-3 ruling for the case Medina versus Planned Parenthood South Atlantic, the Supreme Court allowed states to cut off Medicaid reimbursement to Planned Parenthood for providing health care.

Until now, Medicaid patients have been allowed to seek health care from “any qualified and willing provider” which allowed patients to choose their doctors. Planned Parenthood is a prominent providers of affordable health care. Medicaid generally does not fund abortion services except in rare circumstances, so its reimbursements to Planned Parenthood are for other health care such as birth control, screening for cervical and breast cancer, and treatment of sexually transmitted diseases.

The Republican Governor of South Carolina did not want Planned Parenthood to receive taxpayer funds for any of the services it provides because its network of clinics provides abortions that are separately funded.

A group of South Carolina patients covered by Medicaid sued to reclaim their right to choose where they get their health care.

In a ruling written by Justice Neil Gorsuch, the Supreme Court ruled the patients do not have that right.

The ruling says private individuals can sue only in “atypical” situations when the provision at issue clearly assigned a right to individuals. Gorsuch wrote:

Congress knows how to create clear rights, as [the Federal Nursing Home Reform Act] shows by giving nursing-home residents ‘the right to choose a personal attending physician. But that is not the law here.

The Medicaid provision commonly called “free choice” says “any individual eligible for medical assistance… may obtain such assistance from any institution, agency, community pharmacy, or person, qualified to perform the service or services required… who undertakes to provide him such services.”

Gorsuch claims this wording does not explicitly give individuals the right to choose the provider of the medical assistance they need, so people do not have a right to make that choice.

Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson was joined in dissent by Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan. Jackson wrote that the majority’s interpretation of Medicaid’s free choice clause was the opposite of what Congress intended.

She wrote:

At a minimum, it will deprive Medicaid recipients in South Carolina of their only meaningful way of enforcing a right that Congress has expressly granted to them.

And, more concretely, it will strip those South Carolinians—and countless other Medicaid recipients around the country—of a deeply personal freedom: the ‘ability to decide who treats us at our most vulnerable.

The amount of money at stake in this particular case is only about $90,000 per year in South Carolina, but the nationwide implications are immense. Planned Parenthood is the nation’s largest provider of abortion services, and it is also an essential provider of affordable non-abortion reproductive health care services. Several states will now make it unavailable to those who are least able to afford to go elsewhere for health care.

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