By PATRICK WHITTLE
PORTLAND, Maine (AP) — A network of clinics in Maine will not resume getting Medicaid funds to treat thousands of low-income patients during its lawsuit over Trump administration cuts to abortion providers, a judge ruled Monday.
The decision against Maine Family Planning came despite a ruling last month by another federal judge, who said Planned Parenthood clinics around the country must continue to be reimbursed for Medicaid funding as the provider wrangles with the Trump administration over efforts to defund it. That legal fight continues.
Without Medicaid, the much smaller provider in Maine says it will have to stop serving hundreds of primary care patients by the end of October. The organization says abortions are a relatively small percentage of its overall services, which include cervical cancer screenings, contraception and primary care to low-income residents in one of the poorest and most rural states in the Northeast.
President Donald Trump’s policy and tax bill, known as the “ big beautiful bill,” 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, and it is the only other organization that has come forward publicly to say its funding is at risk.
Maine Family Planning says Medicaid dollars are not used for its abortion services, and it’s unfair to cut off funding for the clinics “solely because Congress wanted to defund Planned Parenthood,” an attorney for the organization told the judge earlier this month.
However, Judge Lance Walker said in his ruling Monday that the payments will not resume during the ongoing lawsuit by the provider seeking to restore the funds. He wrote that Congress can “withhold federal funds and otherwise disassociate from conduct that is not enshrined” as a constitutional right.
Walker, a 2018 Trump appointee, also wrote that it would be “a special kind of judicial hubris” to undermine the big bill, which he described as the end result of democratic processes.
The network of 18 clinics said in a statement Monday that Walker’s ruling will destabilize the state’s entire health infrastructure by potentially turning low-income patients away from their doctors. The group said about 8,000 people receive family planning and primary care from its clinics.
“Mainers’ health should never be jeopardized by political decisions, and we will continue to fight for them,” said George Hill, president and chief executive officer of Maine Family Planning.
When asked if the organization is considering appealing the decision, the group issued a statement that said the network is “considering all options to ensure that Maine’s Medicaid patients can continue to receive the health care they need and deserve.”
Attorneys representing the Trump administration did not immediately comment. Emily Hall, an attorney for the U.S. Department of Justice, told the judge in court earlier this month that Congress has a right not to contract with abortion providers.
“The rational basis is not simply to reduce the number of abortions, it’s to ensure the federal government is not paying out money to organizations that provide abortions,” Hall said.
While advocates of cutting Medicaid for abortion providers 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 — which generally include items such as contraception, abortion and pregnancy tests — and received more than $800,000 from Medicaid in 2023.
The U.S. Senate’s 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.
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