Midwest Chick's Place

Of course the liberal three justices dissented, but the Supreme Court is allowing the state of South Carolina to decide what is, or isn’t, an approved medical provider when it comes to Medicaid.

In this case, the state has decided that Planned Parenthood is not approved since providing taxpayer funded abortions is illegal in SC so the libs are losing their freaking minds.

Planned Parenthood South Atlantic currently operates two clinics in the Palmetto State. In 2018, the state determined that the clinics could not participate in the South Carolina Medicaid program due to state law prohibiting taxpayer-funded abortions. That decision pre-dated the 2022 Dobbs v. Jackson decision that eliminated the constitutional right to an abortion.

The court did not specifically address the matter of whether the state could remove the clinics, but instead found that the Medicaid program did not create an individual right of suit for providers or patients and that enforcement authority lay with Congress. Under typical circumstances, moreover, the federal government may withhold federal funding for state programs if found to be in noncompliance with the terms of the grant.

It is essentially a states’ rights issue to decide where taxpayer money is going.

Mike Kennedy from Utah laid it out quite well:

“Empowerment of states to decide whether they’re going to use Medicaid to cover Planned Parenthood or not is, I think, entirely within the purview – the Plenary Power of states. So I think [the] Supreme Court got it absolutely right here,” 

…

“Planned Parenthood holds itself out as some sort of vital component of women’s healthcare,” Kennedy said on the “John Solomon Reports” podcast. “The reality is we’ve got a vast healthcare system ready to receive and serve these people that need help, and the idea that they can only go to Planned Parenthood is the creation of Planned Parenthood itself. We have urgent care, emergency departments.”

We’ll put another win in the column for returning rights to the states.