Planned Parenthood has spent tens of millions of dollars providing health care to low-income patients and has closed 20 clinics in the months since the Trump administration blocked the group from billing Medicaid — but weathering the funding cut on its own will soon become untenable, its leaders say.
The Medicaid ban took effect in July. A provision tucked into President Donald Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill cut the funding for health care providers that offer abortions and receive more than $800,000 in Medicaid reimbursements each year for basic reproductive health services such as birth control, prenatal care and cervical cancer screenings.
Planned Parenthood has spent tens of millions of dollars providing health care to low-income patients and has closed 20 clinics in the months since the Trump administration blocked the group from billing Medicaid — but weathering the funding cut on its own will soon become untenable, its leaders say.
The Medicaid ban took effect in July. A provision tucked into President Donald Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill cut the funding for health care providers that offer abortions and receive more than $800,000 in Medicaid reimbursements each year for basic reproductive health services such as birth control, prenatal care and cervical cancer screenings.
Planned Parenthood, the nation’s largest abortion provider, pledged to continue performing the procedure. It also challenged the Medicaid ban in court, a fight that is ongoing. The group released a report Wednesday detailing the funding cut’s impacts to date — the same day a federal appeals court is hearing arguments in its lawsuit against the provision.
The 20 clinics the group has closed since the Medicaid ban became law are in addition to more than two dozen Planned Parenthood clinics that shut down earlier this year because of other federal funding cuts. Those that remain open are “being pushed to the brink,” the report said.
In September, a federal appeals court allowed the Medicaid ban to take effect while Planned Parenthood’s lawsuit against the Trump administration plays out.
That month alone, the organization provided $45 million in health care services free of charge for Medicaid patients, according to its new report.
Without Medicaid or a way to backfill the funding, more clinics could close, said Planned Parenthood President and CEO Alexis McGill Johnson — leaving many Medicaid patients without a place to get affordable care. Across the country, Planned Parenthood treats more than 1 million Medicaid patients.
“The damage will only grow,” Johnson said in a news briefing Wednesday.
Planned Parenthood and its allies have for months characterized the ban as a politically motivated effort to kneecap the organization because it provides abortions. Few other providers have been swept up in the Medicaid ban. Those that have are also trying to calculate how they can keep offering basic health care while providing abortions.
To help Planned Parenthood, lawmakers in at least seven states have stepped in. They have helped stitch the large tear in Planned Parenthood’s funding with money from state budgets in California, Colorado, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York and Washington — all states where the organization provides abortions because doing so remains legal.
Still, a funding gap remains.
In Wednesday’s briefing, Planned Parenthood leaders pleaded for state lawmakers to address what they described as a worsening crisis in accessible and affordable health care.
Already, patients are anxious about whom they will turn to if their Planned Parenthood clinics go under, said Luu Ireland, the chief medical officer of Planned Parenthood League of Massachusetts, a party in the case against the Medicaid ban.
On Wednesday, she recounted stories of Medicaid patients who have come to her clinics for care — one of them a teenager who visited with her mother to get birth control for the first time. She worried that if she had issues with the contraceptive, she would have to scramble to go elsewhere if the Planned Parenthood clinic had to shutter.
“These are the kinds of services that cannot wait,” Ireland said.
The post Planned Parenthood closes 20 clinics after Medicaid cuts, warns of grim future
appeared first on Washington Post.
