Court Strikes Down Arizona Law Defunding Planned Parenthood
Source: RawStory
By Scott Kaufman
Thursday, August 22, 2013 16:02 EDT
The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals upheld a U.S. District Court ruling that will prevent Arizona Governor Jan Brewers administration from effectively defunding Planned Parenthood. In their opinion, the panel of judges held that the Arizona law (HB 2800) violates the Medicaid Acts requirement that Medicaid recipients are free to choose their provider by precluding Medicaid patients from using medical providers concededly qualified to perform family planning services to patients in Arizona generally, solely on the basis that those providers separately perform privately funded, legal abortions. The law would have prevented Arizona patients from having access to preventative care including cancer screenings, STI tests, and birth control at a Planned Parenthood health center.
Arizona contended that the statutory term qualified was too vague for the court to enforce. The court disagreed, noting that in the Medicaid Act, qualified is tethered to an objective benchmark: qualified to perform the service or services required. The court stated the requirements for determining the qualifications are no different from the sorts of qualification or expertise that courts routinely make in various contexts, refuting Arizonas claim that it can unilaterally decide who is and who is not qualified to provide family planning services. Read as Arizona suggests, the court argued, the free-choice-of-provider requirement would be self-eviserating because a state could label any exclusionary rule like the availability of legally performed abortions on the premises as a qualification.
This marks the second time in less than a month that Planned Parenthood has defeated an attempt to limit access to its facilities. On July 30, the ACLU prevailed in its lawsuit on behalf Planned Parenthood of Indiana when Judge Tanya Walton Pratt decided that an Indiana law similar to the Arizona one violated the same free-choice-of-provider provision.
Read more: http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2013/08/22/court-strikes-down-arizona-law-defunding-planned-parenthood/
Ilsa
(61,698 posts)sheshe2
(83,929 posts)progressoid
(49,999 posts)Iliyah
(25,111 posts)Finally, although the defunding assholes will continue with their efforts all the way up to the five asshole justices in the USA Supreme Court.