Supreme Court rules against Planned Parenthood in patient rights case
A divided Supreme Court on Thursday ruled against Planned Parenthood, saying Medicaid patients do not have a clear right to sue to obtain non-abortion health care from the organization’s medical providers.
The 6-3 decision reversed a lower court ruling that allowed Planned Parenthood South Atlantic and a patient to seek to reinstate the group’s clinics as qualified health-care providers after South Carolina cut off all Medicaid funding for the organization because it offers abortion services.
Federal law already prevents states from using Medicaid funds to cover abortions in most cases, and the case—Medina v. Planned Parenthood South Atlantic—involves other types of reproductive health care.
But abortion opponents, including Republicans in Congress and the Trump administration, are separately trying to cut off government money for Planned Parenthood for those other types of care.
In 2018, South Carolina Gov. Henry McMaster (R) issued an order directing all state agencies to stop providing public funds to any physician or professional medical practice affiliated with an abortion clinic. The state had paid for non-abortion healthcare at Planned Parenthood for decades through the joint state and federal Medicaid program, which supports low-income people.
The long-running Supreme Court case was brought by Julie Edwards, a patient at Planned Parenthood’s Columbia location who said her plans to obtain gynecologic and reproductive care at the clinic were disrupted when funding was terminated.
At issue for the justices was whether a provision of the federal Medicaid Act allows individual Medicaid patients to sue to obtain care from their provider of choice. The federal statute says a state that participates in Medicaid must ensure that “any individual” insured through Medicaid “may obtain” care from any qualified and willing provider.
Several justices during oral argument seemed eager to provide clarity to help lower courts determine when a statute simply confers a benefit to an individual and when it goes further, empowering those individuals to sue to enforce that benefit or right. The Supreme Court has typically set a high bar for allowing lawsuits against the government, seeking to shield public officials from liability.
A district court judge sided with Edwards and Planned Parenthood, and the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit affirmed that decision, saying South Carolina had impinged on the rights of Medicaid patients by terminating Planned Parenthood as a qualified provider.
“We refuse to nullify Congress’s undeniable desire to extend a choice of medical providers to the less fortunate among us, individuals who experience the same medical problems as the more fortunate in society but who lack under their own means the same freedom to choose their healthcare provider,” wrote Judge J. Harvie Wilkinson III of the 4th Circuit. “In the Medicaid Act, Congress attempted a modest corrective to this imbalance.”
Wilkinson, a nominee of President Ronald Reagan, was joined by Judge James A. Wynn Jr., a nominee of President Barack Obama.
The administration, which backed South Carolina’s position in court, is separately withholding Title X funding from nine Planned Parenthood affiliates with clinics across 20 states that receive money through the federal family-planning program.
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