Maine Family Planning filed a lawsuit Wednesday against the Trump administration seeking to restore Medicaid funding that is set to be stripped under the president’s sweeping tax and spending package.
A provision in the law bans health care providers who perform abortions and receive more than $800,000 in federal reimbursements from receiving Medicaid funding for one year.
Republicans included the provision in the legislation to cut off funding to Planned Parenthood even though the organization is not named in the language of the law.
Planned Parenthood quickly filed an injunction against the Trump administration after President Trump signed his “big, beautiful bill” into law and a judge temporarily paused the measure’s enforcement.
But the provisions stipulations mean that Maine Family Planning, which oversees the largest network of reproductive health clinics in Maine, will also be cut off from Medicaid reimbursements.
“The provision’s parameters were designed to create plausible deniability that its sole target was Planned Parenthood; as a result, MFP got caught in its net,” the lawsuit reads.
If the provision is enacted, thousands of low-income Mainers will lose access to abortion care as well as primary and reproductive health care unrelated to abortion, the organization argues.
The Center for Reproductive Rights filed the lawsuit against the Department of Health and Human Services and the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services on behalf of Maine Family Planning.
In the lawsuit, the plaintiffs ask for emergency relief from the provision so that the nonprofit organization would not be forced to turn away patients who rely on Medicaid and who otherwise are not able to afford to pay out-of-pocket for health care.
They argue withholding Medicaid funding to Maine Family Planning denies it equal protection under the law since other organizations that also receive Medicaid reimbursements for providing the same reproductive health services are not subject to the provision.
“Targeting health care providers who serve the populations with the fewest resources, and doing it by witholding funding simply because they also provide abortion care, is completely opposed to the goal of the Medicaid program—to ensure that adults and children with limited resources can access health care,” the lawsuit states.
Maine Family Planning serves about 8,700 people a year either at one its 18 clinics or via its mobile unit, according to George Hill, president and CEO of Maine Family Planning. “Tens of thousands” of other patients receive health care at one of MFP’s subcontracted clinics throughout the state, the organization said in a statement.
“In a state like Maine, which is large enough to include the rest of New England by geographic area, this is a big threat,” said Hill. “We don’t have patients that are extremely mobile, especially in winter time. We have one highway going North and South. There is no highway going East and West.”
About half MFP’s patients at their primary clinics get their health insurance coverage through Medicaid, and 70 percent of their patients do not see other providers for health care needs.
Hill said at the moment MFP has issued a moratorium on accepting new patients at its primary care clinics but is continuing to care for existing patients with Medicaid and holding off on filing insurance claims.
“We can’t do that forever, obviously,” he said.
A spokesperson for HHS declined to comment on the lawsuit, and a spokesperson for the CMS did not immediately respond to a request for comment from The Hill.
