LOUISVILLE — On the heels of a year-long Medicaid ban, Planned Parenthood officials say they are eyeing the midterms in November, which they believe could be a deciding factor in future funding stability.
Jennifer Allen, the CEO of Planned Parenthood Alliance Advocates and a policy expert with the organization, told the Kentucky Lantern Wednesday during a sit-down interview at the Louisville Health Center that keeping services available during the ban “stretched us.”
During the year it was in effect, Rebecca Gibron, the CEO of Planned Parenthood’s largest geographic affiliate of health centers that includes Kentucky, said centers saw an increase in self pay as well as a “small decrease in our patients.”
The ban expired in July, meaning Kentuckians can once again use Medicaid at Planned Parenthood locations, which offer birth control services, HIV tests, pregnancy testing, prenatal and postpartum care, STD treatment and more. But Allen and Gibron said this isn’t the end of potential threats to funding.
“Politically, we think it’s very calculated that that ban on Medicaid was allowed to expire and hasn’t been re-instituted yet, and that some other pieces of the ‘big bad bill’ that was passed at the federal level are still to come after the midterms,” Allen said. “We think it’s very calculated. Politicians know that it is not popular to attack Planned Parenthood and to attack reproductive health care, and so they’re waiting. They’re waiting until after this election cycle, and then …. we absolutely think that attack and others could be coming on people’s access to reproductive health.”
Because of that, the organization is “working really hard,” said Allen, to “make sure that champions for reproductive health care get elected.”
“It’s not going to change who’s sitting in the president’s chair,” she said, “but it can help with … stemming the tide of these kinds of attacks.”
In Kentucky, the organization has its longest list of candidate endorsements yet, according to Tamarra Weider, Kentucky’s state director of Planned Parenthood Alliance Advocates.
“We are out on the doors. We are talking to people,” she said. “We’ve already hit almost 1,000 doors.”
If future funding bans come down, Gibron said, “it will be a significant blow to the organization; It will be a significant blow to our patients.”
Still, she said: “We’re in Kentucky to stay. Planned Parenthood is not going anywhere.”
Looking to 2027
Planned Parenthood is planning to push for legislation in the 2027 General Assembly that would make Medicaid pay for sexually transmitted infections testing.
“You can come in, and if you have symptoms or believe you’ve been exposed, they will charge you for the tests,” Weider said. “So we’re trying to get rid of the Medicaid test expense for that, and so we have a bill to make it more accessible for treatment and the testing. We’re really excited because it feels like common sense legislation that if you are showing symptoms, that you shouldn’t have to fight with insurance to get those tests.”
She’s also planning to promote a bill to make it easier for Kentuckians to access hormone replacement therapy treatments for perimenopause and menopause symptoms.
