Court adds Medicaid lawsuit to docket
The Supreme Court on Wednesday morning agreed to take up a dispute over whether a South Carolina woman can bring a lawsuit challenging that state’s decision to end Planned Parenthood’s participation in its Medicaid program.
The court’s announcement that it will hear arguments next spring in Kerr v. Planned Parenthood came at approximately 11 a.m. Eastern, along with an order setting oral arguments on Jan. 10 in a pair of appeals seeking to block enforcement of a federal law that would require TikTok to shut down in the United States unless its parent company can sell it off by Jan. 19.
The justices granted two cases from their Dec. 13 conference on Friday afternoon and issued additional orders (mostly denying review) from that conference on Monday morning. Although the justices’ next regularly scheduled conference will not occur until next year, they have sometimes issued additional grants from their final conference of the year a few days later, just as they did on Wednesday.
Under federal law, Medicaid funds cannot generally be used to provide abortions. But Planned Parenthood provides other medical services to women, including gynecological and contraceptive care but also screenings for cancer, high blood pressure, and cholesterol.
At two clinics in Charleston and Columbia, Planned Parenthood has tried to make it easier to lower-income patients, many of whom are covered by Medicaid, to use its services – by, for example, offering same-day appointments and extended clinic hours. One of those Medicaid patients is Julie Edwards, who suffers from diabetes. She went to Planned Parenthood for birth control but says she wants to return to receive other care in the future.
In 2018, South Carolina Governor Henry McMaster ordered the state’s Department of Health and Human Services to bar abortion clinics from participating in the Medicaid program. McMaster explained that the “payment of taxpayer funds to abortion clinics, for any purpose, results in the subsidy of abortion and the denial of the right to life.”
Edwards and Planned Parenthood went to federal court in South Carolina. They argued that McMaster’s order violated a provision of the Medicaid Act that allows any patient who is eligible for Medicaid to seek health care from any “qualified” provider.
A federal appeals court agreed with Edwards and Planned Parenthood and blocked the state from excluding Planned Parenthood from its Medicaid program. That decision prompted the state – represented by the conservative Alliance Defending Freedom – to come to the Supreme Court this summer, asking the justices to decide whether Edwards and Planned Parenthood have a legal right to sue to enforce the Medicaid Act.
The state told the justices that five federal courts of appeals “have wrongly subjected states to private lawsuits Congress never intended.” Moreover, it added, with 70 million Americans receiving Medicaid benefits and tens of thousands of health-care providers participating in the program, the question at the center of the case is “of great national importance.”
But Planned Parenthood and Edwards countered that the question does not come up very often these days. And most of the cases in which it did arise, they continued, “were efforts by states to target Planned Parenthood in ways courts have recognized are unwarranted and politically motivated.” But in any event, they concluded, as all three judges on the court of appeals agreed in this case, the Medicaid law is “clear and unambiguous in conferring a privately enforceable right.”
The justices considered the state’s petition at nine consecutive conferences before finally granting review on Wednesday. The case will likely be slated for argument in either March or April, with a decision to follow by summer.
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