Supreme Court Lets States Defund Planned Parenthood

“Like other States, South Carolina has an administrative process that lets providers challenge their exclusion from the State’s Medicaid program,” Justice Neil Gorsuch wrote for the majority.

“… private enforcement does not always benefit the public, not least because it requires States to divert money and attention away from social services and toward litigation. And balancing those costs and benefits poses a question of public policy that, under our system of government, only Congress may answer.”

Gorsuch noted that the 60-year-old statute did not define what “qualified” meant and that, typically, concerns about whether states are violating conditions for federal funding usually get addressed by lawsuits from the federal government.

“The decision whether to let private plaintiffs enforce a new statutory right poses delicate questions of public policy. New rights for some mean new duties for others,” his opinion stressed. “Though it is rare enough for any statute to confer an enforceable right, spending-power statutes like Medicaid are especially unlikely to do so.”

Liberal Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson penned the dissent and was joined by her two liberal peers, arguing that the Medicaid Act gave patients the right to sue if their preferred provider was deemed disqualified.

“The provision’s history confirms what the text makes evident: that Congress intended the provision to be binding,” Jackson wrote. “Congress made a deliberate choice to protect Medicaid recipients’ ability to choose their own providers by employing statutory language that it knew, based on its Medicare experience, would achieve that end.”

“Congress’s intent could not have been clearer.”

Conservative Justice Clarence Thomas inked a concurring opinion arguing that the high court should go further in limiting plaintiffs’ abilities to sue for constitutional violations under the Civil Rights Act of 1987.