The U.S. Supreme Court on Wednesday agreed to hear a dispute between South Carolina and Planned Parenthood over the state governor's 2018 decision removing the abortion and family planning organization from the list of eligible Medicaid providers. In a short order, the court said it would review whether private individuals have a right to sue to enforce the Medicaid Act's guarantee that Medicaid recipients can choose their own qualified medical providers under the program. South Carolina's top health official is appealing a lower court's decision that individuals such as plaintiff Julie Edwards, a Medicaid patient who received family planning care at Planned Parenthood South Atlantic, can use a federal civil rights law to sue under the Medicaid statute. Robert Kerr, director of the South Carolina Department of Health and Human Services, has argued that the lower federal courts are deeply divided over the question of whether plaintiffs can use §1983 of the 1871 Civil Rights Act to enforce the any-qualified-provider provision of the Medicaid Act. "This Court should grant review and resolve these entrenched splits. Whether a private party can drag a state into federal court for disqualifying a provider should not turn merely on where that state is located," stated Kerr's successful petition for Supreme Court review. The petition was filed by lawyers at the conservative Christian legal advocacy group Alliance Defending Freedom and South Carolina-based Jolley Law Group. Full story from Jimmy Hoover: https://lnkd.in/eXxMNQWU
