August 25, 2026:

Last year’s federal ban on using Medicaid to pay Planned Parenthood might have ended, but its funding has not automatically resumed nationwide.

On July 4, 2025, President Donald Trump’s “One Big Beautiful Bill Act” barred federal Medicaid reimbursements for one year to nonprofit family planning organizations that both provide abortions and received more than $800,000 in Medicaid reimbursements between October 2022 and September 2023. 

The Hyde Amendment already prohibits Medicaid coverage of abortion with rare exceptions; the 2025 provision blocked reimbursement for other preventive care services Medicaid normally covers, like contraception, cancer screenings, STI testing and treatment, and annual exams.

The law never named Planned Parenthood. However, its criteria were so narrow that, as the organization argued in court, they seemed written to target the reproductive health-care giant. Only two other family-planning chains—Maine Family Planning and Health Imperatives, in Massachusetts—lost their funding. 

Officially, these organizations can once again bill Medicaid for covered services. But when I scanned the states to see the status of Planned Parenthood’s federal funding, I found a more complicated budgetary reality. Its affiliate clinics have resumed billing for Medicaid-covered reproductive health-care services in many places—but in other states, GOP lawmakers are finding new ways to starve it of cash.

States have threatened Medicaid coverage, some successfully

After a year-long hiatus, standard federal Medicaid reimbursement should have automatically resumed in about three dozen states, based on a June 2026 report by the health policy research nonprofit KFF. These include the 11 Democrat-led states that spent their own funds to keep affected clinics open—among them California, Connecticut, Illinois, and Maine. 

My research shows that Medicaid payments are also up and running in Republican-run Ohio and purple Pennsylvania, among other states. 

Just because something should automatically happen, however, doesn’t mean it will. 

A handful of states had already blocked Planned Parenthood’s participation in Medicaid programs before the federal government did—some for over a decade. Texas, Arkansas, Mississippi, Missouri, and South Carolina—all Republican strongholds—fall into this category. 

Despite some litigation over their Planned Parenthood exclusions, neither the federal ban nor its expiration changed the status quo in these places. Prior to July 2025, Medicaid patients in these states could not use their coverage at any Planned Parenthood clinic for any service—not birth control, cancer screenings, STI testing, or annual OB-GYN exams. And they still can’t.

Planned Parenthood’s status in Iowa is more legally complicated. 

In 2017, Iowa withdrew from the federally matched family-planning program and created a state-funded alternative—one that explicitly excludes abortion providers, though the Iowa Planned Parenthood clinics still appear to participate in Medicaid. 

But multiple other states have seen their own, similar exclusion laws tied up in court. The Supreme Court’s 2025 decision in Medina v. Planned Parenthood South Atlantic, which held that Medicaid patients cannot sue states in federal court to see the provider of their choice, may bolster these exclusion efforts.

Medicaid’s “free choice of provider” provision generally allows Medicaid patients to receive care from any qualified provider willing to treat them, including Planned Parenthood. Medina did not change the law, but it removed the possibility of federal litigation to enforce it. This eliminated one of the principal ways patients had enforced this provision.

As a result, when a state excludes Planned Parenthood from Medicaid, it’s now harder for patients to challenge that decision. That has created the opportunity for states to revive exclusion laws previously blocked by federal courts. 

For example, after Medina, Indiana moved to vacate a 2013 court injunction on its 2011 law excluding the organization from the state’s Medicaid program. The district court granted that request in July 2026. Planned Parenthood has appealed, but it remains suspended from Indiana’s Medicaid program until the Seventh Circuit rules. 

With Medina removing one of the principal legal barriers to provider exclusions, Planned Parenthood’s state Medicaid eligibility can quickly change. Existing injunctions blocking Planned Parenthood exclusions in other states are now vulnerable to being dissolved, just as Indiana’s was. And it will be much harder for patients in these states to fight future attempts to exclude Planned Parenthood in court. 

States are already taking advantage of Medina.

In July 2025, Oklahoma’s governor cited the case in an executive order blocking abortion providers and groups that facilitate the “procurement of abortion services” from participating in the state’s Medicaid program.

And Nebraska Gov. Jim Pillen issued an executive order in November 2025 that could allow the state to boot providers like Planned Parenthood from its Medicaid program. Nebraska’s Planned Parenthood clinics still list Medicaid as an accepted insurance on their website. 

Other anti-abortion states—including Alabama, Arizona, Florida, Kansas, and Louisiana—may similarly rely on Medina to defend or revive their own exclusion efforts against Planned Parenthood affiliates and other clinics that provide reproductive health care. (Planned Parenthood currently has no clinics in Louisiana, but has said it plans to open one there.)

Lasting effects of the Planned Parenthood funding ban

That’s the legal lay of the land. On the ground, however, the actual impacts of the federal funding ban have varied.

Clinics in states where Medicaid funding was blocked before the “Big, Beautiful Bill” took effect may not have felt a strain with the passage of the 2025 provision, or a major change when it lapsed last month. The same holds for those that served a relatively low number of Medicaid patients. 

In other places, family-planning organizations either absorbed the cost of serving Medicaid holders or had to cease providing an array of services to a large patient population. The expiration of the federal defunding provision cannot erase those financial hardships, and the consequences are still felt today. 

Planned Parenthood said its funding loss contributed to nearly 30 clinic closures nationwide and some 250,000 fewer patient visits.

In late July 2026 alone, Planned Parenthood closed three of its clinics in Michigan. In February, it closed its Lakeland, Florida clinic after 50 years. As patient Kim-Marie Noble told Florida TV station Tampa Bay 28, her first visit to a gynecologist was at a Planned Parenthood, and the closure forced her into “a scramble to try and find somebody” who’d take her insurance. 

In June 2026, the Gainesville Planned Parenthood facility shuttered, too. 

“I’ve been getting birth control at very low prices. I’ve been getting an annual women’s health STD testing,” Rebekah Grace Hart, a patient there, told local station WCJB. 

Now, Hart and other residents of Gainesville, home to roughly 150,000 people, must travel 80 miles to Jacksonville, the nearest remaining clinic. 

“While the provision expired, the damage it caused doesn’t have an ‘end by’ date,” said Angela Vasquez-Giroux, vice president of communications at Planned Parenthood Action Fund, in a statement to Rewire News Group. “And the threat of more harm looms large, as congressional Republicans are eager to pass a permanent ‘defund’ provision before the year is out.”

Maine Family Planning, one of the few independent family-planning clinics big enough to be affected by the 2025 defunding, has not recovered, either. In October 2025, the chain ceased providing primary care services after losing Medicaid eligibility. 

Those services haven’t resumed, George Hill, President and CEO of Maine Family Planning, told RNG in a statement.

“Patients suffer most when the administration plays politics with health care,” he said. 

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