Planned Parenthood doors are open, Indiana won’t let Medicaid patients in

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.

Fifteen years ago, Indiana wasn’t an especially dangerous place to be pregnant. But since the state began its attacks on Planned Parenthood, Indiana has gone from just under the national average in maternal mortality rates to one of the deadliest states in America to be pregnant.

Indiana patients are being left behind on two fronts at once: a maternal health system already in collapse, and a Medicaid door that state leaders are trying to barricade shut. Since Planned Parenthood has been excluded from Indiana Medicaid, our health centers have seen a nearly 20% drop in patient visits, despite a dearth of alternate reproductive health care providers who take Medicaid.

As restrictions pile up, Hoosiers have watched 13 rural labor and delivery units close since 2020, leaving over half of Indiana rural counties without one. Black women die more than one and a half times more often than the state maternal mortality average. And the exodus compounds itself: after Dobbs, medical residency applications to states like ours dropped by at least 10%, and primary care health professional shortage areas swelled to 169. Hostile conditions that criminalize providers hurt recruitment, retention, and the number of medical professionals available to provide care.

It’s no surprise that the Medicaid ban targeting Planned Parenthood’s safety-net care has been wildly unpopular when people can’t get the care they need. Elected leaders know it, which is why Congress quietly declined to renew the federal ban. Remarkably, Indiana leaders continue to double down.

And here is the part that gives their game away entirely: Planned Parenthood no longer provides abortions in Indiana and hasn’t since the state’s own abortion ban took effect in 2022. Indiana is fighting to enforce an anti-abortion-provider law against an organization that isn’t providing abortion. That is why we’re fighting back to put a stop to these targeted attacks so we can do what we do best: provide patients with high-quality health care.

Where we can welcome back covered care for Medicaid patients, like in Kentucky, we’re relieved. But relief isn’t repair. A year of non-covered care doesn’t simply un-happen: skipped screenings, untreated infections, abnormal results left unchecked. Some patients rationed their health care. Some found money they couldn’t spare. Many, many went without. Cancer doesn’t pause for legislation or litigation. And across our health centers within our six-state organization, Indiana patients are being hit hardest by the very people they elected to protect them.

The people of Indiana deserve better than a government that repeatedly inserts itself between them and their care. We intend to make sure they get it. Be it in the courtroom, at the statehouse, by keeping our doors open and expanding telehealth options—we won’t quit until every person in Indiana has the power to decide what’s best for their bodies, lives, and futures.