For the better part of a year, nonprofit reproductive healthcare provider Planned Parenthood has been struggling more than usual under a 2025 mandate from President Donald Trump’s administration that had barred the organization from billing Medicaid for its services.
This past weekend, the mandate expired.
“Today is a relief for patients and for the principle that everyone deserves access to high-quality health care, regardless of their income or insurance status,” Melissa Reed, CEO of Planned Parenthood Keystone, said in a press release the day the restriction was lifted. “For the last year, patients faced the possibility of losing access to their trusted provider because of a politically motivated effort to block Planned Parenthood from participating in Medicaid.”
She added: “We are relieved to welcome Medicaid patients back to our health centers, and remain committed to providing compassionate, expert care to everyone who walks through our doors.”
Planned Parenthood has long struggled under this and other restrictions put in place by conservative leadership, because it provides abortion services among its many offerings. The order pertaining to Medicaid billing had been included in a taxation and spending law Trump signed last July, and it further strained the organization – in the time since its signing, just shy of 30 of its 600 or so clinics have been shut down, with the funding shift named as a main reason.
There were also far fewer breast cancer screenings administered, and fewer packs of birth control pills prescribed, the Associated Press reported.
Though relief is now on offer, anti-abortion activists have vowed to continue their fight. Republicans in office have “defunded Big Abortion before,” Kelsey Pritchard, a spokesperson for Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America, told The Guardian. “And they should do everything in their power to do it again.”
In the meantime, some patients in need of care are still left grappling with uncertainty at best, and unavailability at worst, experts note.
Evelyn Kieltyka, senior vice president of Maine Family Planning (another clinic impacted by the mandate), said in a statement to the AP that the group won’t bring back its primary care practices, despite the lifted mandate. “When you close something down and you lose positions … it’s very difficult to bring that back and build it back up again,” she explained.
Michelle Quesada, vice president of a Planned Parenthood affiliate in Florida, added that some of their now-closed outposts won’t be reopening either, largely because Republicans in power could simply shut them down once more. “There’s no telling with this uncertainty. It’s like a yo-yo effect.”
