Planned Parenthood’s Medicaid patients were like ‘cash cows’ that we milked for all we could

Every year Planned Parenthood receives over half a billion dollars in taxpayer funding. What absolutely blows my mind is knowing how much fraud takes place at Planned Parenthood, and yet, they still receive this federal funding!

Out of 51 Planned Parenthood affiliate audits, almost all found fraud through overbilling. The average amount of each instance was around $94,000; in total, we’re talking millions and millions of dollars. Iowa, Texas, Wisconsin, Illinois, New York, and Pennsylvania are just some of the states where fraud and overbilling by Planned Parenthood have been found.

Medicaid patients are like mini cash cows for Planned Parenthood. And when I worked there, we milked those patients for all we could get away with… and we did get away with it.

Patients who went to Planned Parenthood abortion centers used federal funds to pay for post-abortion exams at Planned Parenthood’s non-abortion centers. We not only served them, but we served them for free as a “courtesy to women who have already paid hundreds of dollars for an abortion.” We were told to never document in the patient’s chart, nor bill in the system, that they received post-abortion services.

If a Medicaid patient at Planned Parenthood chose pills as her birth control method, then we “sold” 13 packages of pills to her and billed Medicaid for it all. (Don’t ask me how that’s possible, because I have no clue, but we did it and were told that was the way it was done.) But if a month or so later that same patient decided that the birth control pills weren’t working out for her and she now wanted the Depo Provera shot, we administered that and billed Medicaid again (meaning months worth of Medicaid-purchased birth control pills sold to the patient went unused).

Every Medicaid patient that came in received STI testing for every single STI/STD. Anyone who’s ever worked in the medical field knows that unnecessary labs are not routinely performed on patients. But this wasn’t the case at Planned Parenthood. The STI testing really served two purposes. One, it allowed us to meet our quotas (which I’ve talked about before, here), and two, it allowed Planned Parenthood to increase its statistics for STI tests performed.

Planned Parenthood’s Abortion Quotas

We did everything we could to convince a woman that she needed to get tested for HIV, herpes, gonorrhea, and syphilis. If there was a test for it, we administered it. Of course, Medicaid didn’t reimburse for these tests, but what they did reimburse Planned Parenthood for was the lab handling fee. So it was imperative that we billed for the lab handling fee for all Medicaid patients. This was not something we billed for all other patients.

Therefore, Planned Parenthood was able to recoup money from that half a billion dollars in federal funding. It was a win-win sales strategy.