Getting your
Trinity Audioplayer ready...Planned Parenthood has regained access to hundreds of millions in federal Medicaid funding as a Republican congressional ban expired after a year.
The beleaguered women’s health organization still cannot receive funds for abortions but can resume billing the feds for up to $800 million a year for other health services like birth control and screening for sexually transmitted diseases that it provides to poor and disabled patients.
President Trump and his Republican allies banned all federal funding to the group as part of his One Big Beautiful Bill that passed on party line votes last year.
Republicans have been unable to extend the ban amid fierce internal divisions and their narrow majority in the House of Representatives and inability to win Democratic support in the Senate, which mostly requires a 60-vote majority to pass most legislation.
Abortion and women’s rights advocates cheered the expiration of the ban on July 5 even though it could be reimposed and conservatives are seeking other ways to hobble Planned Parenthood.
The ban and other funding cuts has caused Planned Parenthood to shut dozens of clinics in red states. New York and other Democratic states have sought to cushion the financial blow by increasing spending for services the group provides.
Some Planned Parenthood chapters have been urging Medicaid patients to return to clinics for services now that the ban has expired and at least one new clinic is set to reopen later this year in Louisiana.
GOP leaders have prioritized other issues like immigration and military spending and have been hobbled by strategy disagreements, angering their allies in the anti-abortion movement.
“(The ban) is the default expectation from the pro-life movement,” Kelsey Pritchard, a spokesperson for anti-abortion group Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America said of the Planned Parenthood funding ban.
Republicans pushed last year to include permanent defunding of Planned Parenthood in Trump’s mega bill, which they passed on a party-line vote using the reconciliation process. But a ruling by the Senate parliamentarian forced them to make it only a one-year prohibition.
It was dropped from an immigration enforcement bill that passed earlier this year. Some abortion opponents hope that Congress will try to defund the reproductive health provider again in a new reconciliation bill later this summer.
But given the dysfunctional GOP House and factional feuds over other issues, few believe it can get done before the midterm elections.
“I don’t know that there’ll be a later,” Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.), a conservative abortion foe, told Politico.