The Supreme Court ruled Thursday that South Carolina can strip Planned Parenthood of taxpayer funds, delivering a major win to Republican-led states aiming to defund the nation’s largest abortion provider.
In a 6–3 ruling along ideological lines, the justices found that the 1965 Medicaid Act doesn’t give individual patients the right to sue states over their choice of qualified providers, clearing the way for South Carolina to block Medicaid dollars from flowing to Planned Parenthood.
The decision overturns lower court rulings, including one from the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals, which had sided with Planned Parenthood and slapped an injunction on the state’s funding ban.
“Like other States, South Carolina has an administrative process that lets providers challenge their exclusion from the State’s Medicaid program,” Justice Neil Gorsuch wrote for the majority.
“… private enforcement does not always benefit the public, not least because it requires States to divert money and attention away from social services and toward litigation. And balancing those costs and benefits poses a question of public policy that, under our system of government, only Congress may answer.”
From The New York Post:
In 2018, South Carolina Gov. Henry McMaster signed an executive order preventing all abortion clinics, including Planned Parenthood South Atlantic, from receiving Medicaid funding.
Medicaid is a federal and state government program that provides health insurance to over 70 million low-income Americans.
Attorneys for plaintiff Julie Edwards, a patient who is eligible for Medicaid, and Planned Parenthood argued that the ban violated federal law that states beneficiaries “may obtain” medical treatment from qualified providers.
Gorsuch noted that the 60-year-old statute did not define what “qualified” meant and that, typically, concerns about whether states are violating conditions for federal funding usually get addressed by lawsuits from the federal government.
“The decision whether to let private plaintiffs enforce a new statutory right poses delicate questions of public policy. New rights for some mean new duties for others,” his opinion stressed. “Though it is rare enough for any statute to confer an enforceable right, spending-power statutes like Medicaid are especially unlikely to do so.”
More over at The New York Post:
Supreme Court rejects challenge to South Carolina defunding Planned Parenthood https://t.co/wJ8Iz4l1oV pic.twitter.com/t0s2743PJz
— New York Post (@nypost) June 26, 2025
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Author: Lord Staff
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