Trump’s Megabill Would Halt Funding For A Year To Clinics That Provide Abortions

By Benjamin J. Hulac
Washington Correspondent For the NJ Spotlight News

WASHINGTON — Health clinics and medical organizations that provide abortion services including Planned Parenthood could lose federal funding for a year under a new national law, dealing a financial blow to low-income patients in New Jersey and beyond.

Except in rare circumstances, federal dollars cannot be used for abortions. But clinics that provide abortion services have been eligible to receive reimbursement through Medicaid, the federal health insurance program, for other elements of their work, such as contraception, cancer screenings and testing for sexually transmitted infections.

Under the new law, clinics are ineligible for the federal funding if they provide abortions, received $800,000 or more in Medicaid reimbursements in 2023, and serve poor and underserved communities.

Planned Parenthood on Monday filed a federal lawsuit in Massachusetts against the funding halt, which the group has called a “backdoor abortion ban.”

The one-year moratorium was folded into a sweeping bill, which President Donald Trump signed Friday, that includes deep spending cuts to federal assistance programs including Medicaid, student loan programs and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP.

Clinic closures

It also arrives two weeks after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled, 6 to 3, that individual Medicaid recipients do not have the legal standing to sue to get care, other than abortion treatment, from Planned Parenthood.

That ruling will allow South Carolina, a party in the case, to cut off Medicaid funding for Planned Parenthood and could enable other states to do so, too.

Medicaid alone funds more than 40% of the New Jersey state budget.

‘No state has the ability to be able to completely offset the major cuts that this bill puts into place.’ — Sen. Andy Kim (D-NJ)

Cuts to Medicaid will affect Planned Parenthood patients overall, not just those seeking abortion care, advocates said.

One of every three Planned Parenthood centers nationwide could close, said Kelly Baden, vice president for public policy at the Guttmacher Institute, a nonprofit policy organization that tracks sexual and reproductive health.

‘Unrelenting’ attacks

“Collectively in New Jersey, about 30% of patients who visit a Planned Parenthood health center use Medicaid as their insurance,” Kaitlyn Wojtowicz, executive director of the Planned Parenthood Action Fund of New Jersey, said in an interview before the bill became law.

Republicans exult after Congress passes Trump’s megabill“We know how to plan strategically for these attacks, because they are unrelenting,” Wojtowicz said when asked how her organization is planning at the state level, adding that it would talk with members of the Legislature about how to “make sure that we can still try and provide patients the care that they need and deserve.”

It’s unclear what Planned Parenthood clinics could close, or how funding cuts would fall, Wojtowicz said, but cuts will likely happen, just as they did when former Gov. Chris Christie, a two-term Republican, cut funding for family planning centers in 2014. “It’s just a reality of the situation, because we know that that will be a consequence,” Wojtowicz said.

Planned Parenthood estimates the law will trigger the closure of 200 of its centers nationwide and more than 90% of those will happen in states where abortion is legal.

Loss of Medicaid coverage

About 350,000 people eligible for Medicaid in New Jersey could lose coverage under the new law, according to the state’s Department of Human Services.

The state could also lose $3.3 billion in hospital and public health funding, according to figures from the department, which expects a minimum $360 million cut to the state budget under the new federal law.

Cuts to Medicaid will affect Planned Parenthood patients overall, not just those seeking abortion care, advocates said.

“The New Jersey state budget, like many budgets across all the states, things are tight,” Sen. Andy Kim (D-NJ) said in an interview with NJ Spotlight News as Congress was writing the legislation that became law. “No state has the ability to be able to completely offset the major cuts that this bill puts into place.”

A version of the bill the House passed included a 10-year ban, rather than a one-year ban, but that was stripped out during Senate negotiations.

Removed too was language added in a Republican amendment that would have blocked states where abortions are legal under state law — there are 13, including New Jersey — from receiving funding under the Affordable Care Act, the 2010 health care law often called Obamacare.

Not just Planned Parenthood

The law will affect abortion providers beyond Planned Parenthood and have “ripple effects beyond one individual organization,” said Christian LoBue, president of the National Institute for Reproductive Health, an advocacy group that works to expand abortion access.

States where abortion is legal could see an increase in patients as clinics elsewhere close and restrictions from the recent court ruling tighten, LoBue said.

NJ’s new budget may get walloped as US Senate passes Trump’s tax bill“Patients from other places might increasingly rely on New Jersey clinics,” LoBue said. “But then if New Jersey’s own Medicaid system comes under budgetary strain as a result of the federal budget, it could be harder to absorb that increased demand.”

LoBue added: “You combine that with cuts to take Medicaid away altogether, you’ve essentially created a perfect storm of political interference and the vast disenfranchisement of low-income patients that will fall ultimately on state budgets and within states where abortion care is still legal.”

Among women living in poverty, abortion rates in 2014, before the federal right to abortion was overturned, was 36.6 abortions per 1,000 women of reproductive age, according to the Brookings Institution, a nonpartisan think tank.

That rate is more than double the rate of the broader population of women of reproductive age, which is 14.6 abortions per 1,000 women.

Katie Daniel, director of legal affairs and policy counsel at the Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America organization, an anti-abortion group, called Planned Parenthood’s lawsuit a mark of “desperation.”

“Life is winning and the nation’s abortion giant won’t be missed as their long decline continues,” Daniel said in a statement Monday, touting abortion funding blocked under the law.