Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer has infuriated many in her home state by opting into Obamacare's Medicaid expansion. One powerful lobbying group, however, is trying to use her plan to expand health care to more low-income Arizonans to do something they failed at in the courts:
defund Planned Parenthood.
The Center for Arizona Policy is lobbying the governor and legislature to include the amendment, using legal analysis from the Arizona-based Alliance Defending Freedom, a Christian legal-defense organization. They argue that any public funding to Planned Parenthood is a problem because money going to the organization in any form just frees up money elsewhere for the organization to provide abortions.
The amendment suggested in a letter this week to Brewer from Cathi Herrod, the center’s president, is similar to a law signed by the governor last year to defund Planned Parenthood and other abortion providers. [...]
“Our request is to include language guaranteeing that no funding to an abortion provider results from Medicaid expansion,” Herrod said. “Any dollar that goes to an abortion provider for any service frees up another dollar to subsidize abortion.”
Last month, a federal judge
overturned the law signed by Brewer to defund Planned Parenthood, writing that the state "may not restrict a beneficiary's right to select any qualified provider for reasons wholly unrelated to the provider's ability to deliver Medicaid services." Thwarted legally in that effort, Arizona's forced birth lobby is trying this new avenue to defund Planned Parenthood, and to potentially cut off expanded health care to as many as
354,000 [pdf] eligible state residents.
Brewer has to woo enough Republicans in the legislature over to her side to get expansion through, but at the same time, she can't lose Democrats, who are threatening to bail if the plan is loaded up with amendments, and who will surely bail if this Planned Parenthood defunding amendment is included. So it serves two purposes for the opponents of Medicaid expansion: It's another attempt to defund Planned Parenthood and a potential poison pill that could kill the proposal.