Appeals court overturns lower court ruling in Planned Parenthood Medicaid fraud case

A federal appeals court on Wednesday overturned a lower court’s 2023 ruling stating that Planned Parenthood could be liable for nearly $2 billion for defrauding Medicaid.

The case, Doe v. Planned Parenthood Federation of America, involves a lawsuit from Texas and Louisiana, in which the states say the abortion business defrauded them out of millions in Medicaid funding.

The states sought to remove Planned Parenthood as a Medicaid recipient after the 2015 release of undercover videos from the Center for Medical Progress (CMP). The undercover videos showed top executives from Planned Parenthood haggling over prices for the sale of body parts from preborn babies its abortionists had killed.

Though Texas was able to remove Planned Parenthood from its Medicaid funding program by 2017, the abortion business continued to bill for — and receive — reimbursement for services. Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton sued in 2022 to recover $10 million paid to the abortion giant after the 2017 date, as well as more than $1 billion in damages.

“It is unthinkable that Planned Parenthood would continue to take advantage of funding knowing they were not entitled to keep it,” Paxton stated in a news release at the time. “I will not allow them to benefit from this abhorrent conduct after they were caught violating medical standards and lying to law enforcement.”

READ: 6 key facts about the revealing New York Times exposé on Planned Parenthood’s ‘crisis’

In 2023, Texas U.S. District Court Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk said that Planned Parenthood had to return the funds. Now, according to Law & Crime, the pre-trial ruling from the three-judge panel at the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals “reversed Kacsmaryk’s ruling, holding that a third party does not have a valid legal claim against attorneys for advice they gave to their own clients.”

As Politico explains, the ruling “focused on the challengers’ attempt to hold Planned Parenthood’s national organization financially liable by arguing that the group’s lawyers wrongly advised their affiliates in Texas and Louisiana to continue billing Medicaid while the case played out. The appeals court held that the attorneys can’t be sued by a third party for advice they gave to their own clients.”

“If private attorneys did not have immunity for their activities within the scope of litigation, they would be subject to suit from a third party every time they represent an unpopular client or advance an unpopular issue,” the judges wrote. “It is not difficult to imagine the chilling effect that would have on private attorneys’ willingness to participate in unpopular cases.”

According to Politico, the case will now return to the district court and Kacsmaryk for further proceedings.