This month, patients across the country regained their right to use their Medicaid coverage at Planned Parenthood health centers. The one-year ban, which Congress enacted last year, has expired, and Medicaid patients are once again using their coverage at Planned Parenthood health centers across the country — but not here in Indiana.
For months, the state fought in court to make sure Indiana patients never regain that access. And this week, a federal court lifted a 13-year injunction, allowing the state’s purely political attempt to kick Planned Parenthood out of Medicaid. Attorney General Todd Rokita sought to resurrect a fifteen-year-old law to keep Hoosiers with low incomes away from providers they trust to receive preventive and essential care like cancer screenings, birth control, STI tests, treatment and vaccinations. Put simply, the state is trying to push that care out of reach for those who need it.
That knocked down law has a history worth remembering. In 2011, Indiana became the first state to try to remove Planned Parenthood from participating in any public program, not just Medicaid and not just for abortion. A federal judge blocked the law from ever taking effect, ruling that Hoosiers on Medicaid have the right to decide who provides their care: the patient chooses, not politicians. For more than a decade that ruling held. Then last summer, President Donald Trump and Congress banned Planned Parenthood from Medicaid nationwide, and the U.S. Supreme Court stripped patients of the power to fight back in federal court. Rokita saw his opening and took it…