Power

Texas Planned Parenthood Affiliates Sue to Reinstate Medicaid Funding

The lawsuit filed in federal court Monday claims anti-choice lawmakers in Texas are playing political games with family planning funding. Again.

The lawsuit filed in federal court Monday claims anti-choice lawmakers in Texas are playing political games with family planning funding. Again. Shutterstock

Texas Planned Parenthood affiliates filed a lawsuit in federal court Monday challenging efforts by anti-choice lawmakers to strip the reproductive health-care provider of Medicaid funding.

Ten patient co-plaintiffs joined the affiliates in filing the lawsuit, which argues the decision last month by state health officials to cut off Medicaid funding to Planned Parenthood affiliates violates federal law because it prevents their Medicaid-enrolled patients from obtaining care at their provider of choice.

Texas officials and Republican legislators had cited heavily edited smear videos by an anti-choice front group called the Center for Medical Progress as evidence that the Planned Parenthood affiliates were no longer “qualified providers” under the Medicaid statute.

“The State has determined that you and your Planned Parenthood affiliates are no longer capable of performing medical services in a professionally competent, safe, legal, and ethical manner,” Stuart Bowen Jr., inspector general of the Texas Health & Human Services Commission, wrote in October.

Three days after the state announced plans to end Medicaid contracts for Planned Parenthood affiliates in Texas, state officials raided the nonprofit’s health centers, seemingly in an attempt to justify its decision to terminate the affiliates’ funding.

As alleged in the compliant, the decision by state health officials to end Medicaid funding to the Planned Parenthood affiliates puts at risk care for about 13,500 patients who rely on those centers for HIV screenings, cancer screenings, birth control, and other preventive care. The lawsuit seeks an emergency order blocking those efforts, claiming patients could lose care as early as December 8.

“Texas’s attempt to cut 13,500 women from health care is mean-spirited and cruel. Politicians are looking to score a few cheap, shameful political points at the expense our patients who face the greatest challenges accessing care,” Jeffery Hons, president and CEO of Planned Parenthood South Texas, said in a statement following the filing.

“Preventing health centers affiliated with Planned Parenthood from treating women, in Texas or other states, will without question keep women from getting important preventive care and screening services,” Dr. Hal C. Lawrence, executive vice president and CEO of the American Congress of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, said in a statement. “We cannot continue imposing barriers to care on women. And when we do it in a way that disproportionately impacts underserved or low-income women, we are growing the health disparities that we should be focused on reducing.”

Federal courts recently blocked similar Republican efforts to restrict access to care at Planned Parenthood health centers in Louisiana, Arkansas, Alabama, and Utah. So far two federal courts of appeals, the Seventh and Ninth Circuits, have agreed and upheld decisions blocking similar efforts by GOP officials in Indiana and Arizona to strip the reproductive health-care provider of Medicaid funds.

The Supreme Court declined to review both of those rulings, leaving those appellate court decisions to stand.

“Texas is a cautionary tale for the whole nation—with politicians in Arkansas, Alabama, Ohio, and Louisiana trying to do the very same thing,” Cecile Richards, president of Planned Parenthood Federation of America, said in a statement. Taken together, these measures threaten to devastate access to critical health care and education across vast regions of the country—all in the name of politics.”