Texas voters picked a new attorney general last week. Within days, the Trump administration told a federal court it will take up the fight the old one started.
The Justice Department has notified the court that it intends to intervene in Texas’s five-year-old lawsuit accusing Planned Parenthood of Medicaid fraud, the Texas Tribune and KBTX reported. The state is seeking more than $1.8 billion in reimbursements, penalties and fees, a figure built on about $10 million in disputed Medicaid payments. Trial is set for April 2027 before U.S. District Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk, a Trump appointee.
Ken Paxton’s office filed the case in 2022, after Texas moved to remove Planned Parenthood from its Medicaid program. Democrat Nathan Johnson was elected to succeed Paxton this month. His response was cautious: “We are reviewing this action closely, including what it means for Texans and what the law allows.”
Planned Parenthood calls the suit meritless. “The Trump administration has spent two years trying to shut down Planned Parenthood through legislative, administrative, and legal attacks,” said Susan Baker Manning, a senior vice president. The organization has warned that an adverse ruling could force it to close its remaining operations in Texas.
Who is on the other end of the bill
Medicaid is the insurance that pays for Black births. It covers nearly two-thirds of Black babies’ births nationally, according to federal data cited in States Newsroom reporting, and Black women are nearly three times as likely as white women to die during childbirth. A clinic that takes Medicaid and offers contraception, cancer screening and prenatal referrals is not a political prop for those women. It is the nearest door.
Texas has already shown what losing those clinics does. Research on the 2021 exit of Planned Parenthood’s Texas affiliates from the state’s Medicaid program found patients who missed or postponed care and reported emotional distress. Earlier research on Texas’s family planning program found lower contraceptive continuation and more Medicaid-covered births after Planned Parenthood was cut out.
The case has an odd shape now. Texas’s new attorney general has not said whether he will keep pressing a claim his predecessor filed, and the federal government is moving to make sure the claim survives either way.
A suit this size is meant to be paid or to close the doors. Johnson should tell Texans, before the April trial, which of those he wants.
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