Planned Parenthood clinics treated patients relying on Medicaid at over 1.5 million visits in 2024, according to new research published on Wednesday. However, the reproductive health organisation’s ability to serve those patients is now under threat following Republican efforts to exclude it from the Medicaid programme.
Donald Trump’s tax and spending package, passed in July, bans Planned Parenthood from receiving Medicaid reimbursements. After the organisation sued, a judge temporarily blocked the ban from taking effect. Experts warn that if it proceeds, it could cripple the US healthcare safety net for low-income people.
“Planned Parenthood has filled a very important role in the reproductive healthcare safety net for people living on low incomes,” said Kari White, lead author of the study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association. “Other providers have counted on them to do so. They just don’t have the capacity to step in.”
The study highlights that access to contraception could be severely affected. After Texas began excluding Planned Parenthood from its Medicaid programme over a decade ago, placements of contraceptive implants and intrauterine devices fell by more than a third in counties with a Planned Parenthood clinic. Births covered by Medicaid among injectable contraceptive users rose by almost a third.
Although Republicans have long sought to defund Planned Parenthood over its abortion services, federal dollars including Medicaid are already prohibited from funding most abortions. The 1.5 million visits cited in the study were for reasons other than abortion. In California, one affiliate warned it would lose roughly $50 million, half its budget, if the ban goes ahead. Staff faced uncertainty about their jobs, and a programme screening 100,000 patients annually for sexually transmitted infections is at risk.
“They haven’t been able to ban abortion outright, so they’re trying to take away the money for services like cancer screening, STI testing, birth control, and essentially trying to shut us down,” said Nichole Ramirez of Planned Parenthood of Orange and San Bernardino Counties.
