{"id":46110,"date":"2025-08-14T01:28:00","date_gmt":"2025-08-14T06:28:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/ustower.net\/?p=46110"},"modified":"2025-08-14T06:00:25","modified_gmt":"2025-08-14T11:00:25","slug":"clinics-hope-to-get-blocked-medicaid-funds-restored-as-they-sue-trump-admin-over-cuts","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ustower.net\/?p=46110","title":{"rendered":"Clinics hope to get blocked Medicaid funds restored as they sue Trump admin over cuts"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

PORTLAND, Maine — A network of clinics that provides health care in Maine is expected to ask a judge Thursday to restore its Medicaid funding while it fights a Trump administration effort<\/a> to keep federal money from going to abortion providers.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

President Donald Trump’s policy and tax bill, known as the \u201c big beautiful bill<\/a>,\u201d blocked Medicaid money from flowing to Planned Parenthood, the nation’s largest abortion provider. The parameters in the bill also stopped funding from reaching Maine Family Planning, a much smaller provider that provides health care services in one of the poorest and most rural states in the Northeast.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Maine Family Planning filed a federal lawsuit last month seeking to restore reimbursements.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Lawyers and representatives for Maine Family Planning say its 18 clinics provide vital services across the state including cervical cancer screenings, contraception and primary care to low-income residents. They also say the funding cut occurred even though Medicaid dollars are not used for its abortion services.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cWithout Medicaid, MFP will be forced to stop providing all primary care for all patients \u2014 regardless of their insurance status \u2014 by the end of October,\u201d the organization said in a statement, adding that about 8,000 patients receive family planning and primary care from the network.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It also said many Maine Family Planning clinics \u201cprovide care in very rural areas of the state where there are no other health care providers, and around 70% of their patients rely exclusively on MFP and will not see any other health care provider in a given year.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In court documents, Anne Marie Costello, deputy director for the Center for Medicaid & CHIP Services, called the request to restore funding \u201clegally groundless\u201d and said it \u201cmust be firmly rejected.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThe core of its claim asks this Court to revive an invented constitutional right to abortion \u2014 jurisprudence that the Supreme Court decisively interred \u2014 and to do so in a dispute over federal funds,\u201d Costello said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

While advocates of cutting Medicaid for abortion providers<\/a> focused on Planned Parenthood, the bill did not mention it by name. Instead it cut off reimbursements for organizations that are primarily engaged in family planning services \u2014 which generally include things such as contraception, abortion and pregnancy tests \u2014 and received more than $800,000 from Medicaid in 2023.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The U.S. Senate\u2019s parliamentarian rejected a 2017 effort to defund Planned Parenthood because it was written to exclude all other providers by barring payments only to groups that received more than $350 million a year in Medicaid funds. Maine Family Planning asserts in its legal challenge that the threshold was lowered to $800,000 this time around to make sure Planned Parenthood would not be the only entity affected.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It is the only other organization that has come forward publicly to say its funding is at risk.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

abcnews<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

PORTLAND, Maine — A network of clinics that provides health care in Maine is expected to ask a judge Thursday to restore its Medicaid funding while it fights a Trump administration effort to keep federal money from going to abortion providers. President Donald Trump’s policy and tax bill, known as the \u201c big beautiful bill,\u201d blocked Medicaid money from […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":46111,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1154],"tags":[6361,2284,1230],"class_list":["post-46110","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-trending","tag-clinics","tag-medicaid","tag-trump"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ustower.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/46110","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ustower.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ustower.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ustower.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ustower.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=46110"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/ustower.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/46110\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":46112,"href":"https:\/\/ustower.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/46110\/revisions\/46112"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ustower.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/46111"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ustower.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=46110"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ustower.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=46110"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ustower.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=46110"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}