Planned Parenthood Sues to Stop Texas Cutting it from Medicaid
Texas is a frontrunner among U.S. states trying to defund Planned Parenthood. There are currently only four Planned Parenthood clinics in the entire state of Texas, and the state is still fighting those four. Last week, according to The Cut, the state announced that it would be cutting Planned Parenthood from its network of Medicaid service providers. Planned Parenthood isn’t going down without a fight, though, and they’ve filed a lawsuit to prevent these terminations from going through.
According to The Guardian, Planned Parenthood has filed a temporary injunction to prevent those cuts from going into effect.
Medicaid money already can’t be used to pay for abortions, but as we all know, Planned Parenthood provides a lot of services that are not abortions. They offer cancer and STD screenings, contraception, health care, and more. (They also provide these same services for men.) Keeping people on Medicaid from using Planned Parenthood to provide healthcare would negatively impact thousands of people in Texas, and it would have the biggest negative effect on low-income women.
”Courts have unanimously prevented these terminations and agreed that preventing Medicaid enrollees from obtaining care from the qualified provider of their choice violates federal law,” Planned Parenthood wrote in its suit.
Similar situations have been playing out across the U.S. Other Federal judges have already stopped Arkansas, Alabama, Kansas, and Mississippi from cutting off Planned Parenthood as a Medicaid service provider. Those efforts to defund Planned Parenthood didn’t work, but Texas doesn’t seem to care.
