Medicaid is a State-run program for providing a measure of medical service for that State’s relatively indigent citizens. The program is State-run, but it’s jointly funded by the State’s taxpayers and by the nation’s taxpayers via Federal funds transferred to each State for the purpose. I’ve often written that Federal funds for Medicaid should be ended and that the States should be allowed to fund and manage their Medicaid programs alone—without Federal funding and associated Federal interference.
Here’s another reason to end Federal funding for a State’s Medicaid program.
US District Judge Kristine Baker issued a preliminary injunction preventing Arkansas from suspending payments to Planned Parenthood for any services to Medicaid patients in the state. Republican Governor Asa Hutchinson last year terminated the organization’s Medicaid contract because of secretly recorded videos made by an anti-abortion group.
Baker also expects that Planned Parenthood would win at trial, hence her injunction.
Unfortunately, the Federal judge is right on the law, if only on 14th Amendment grounds, and on the courts’ Taney-esque position that unborn babies aren’t fully human.
Other than changing that law, though, the way around this sort of thing is that elimination of Federal funds for any State’s Medicaid program. With that elimination, States that disapprove of Planned Parenthood’s funding of abortions could stop funding Planned Parenthood, and States that approve of easy abortions could continue to do so.
