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FILE – Vanessa Shields-Haas, a nurse practitioner, walks from the lobby toward the examination rooms at the Maine Family Planning healthcare facility, July 15, 2025, in Thomaston, Maine.

AP Photo/Charles Krupa, file

Maine clinics also hit by cuts that targeted Planned Parenthood plan to halt primary care

By The Canadian Press

Published 2:40 PDT, Wed October 1, 2025

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PORTLAND, Maine (AP) — A network of medical clinics that serves low-income residents in Maine said Wednesday it is shutting down its primary care operations because of Trump administration cuts to abortion providers.

President Donald Trump’s policy and tax bill, known as the “big beautiful bill,” blocked Medicaid money from Planned Parenthood, the nation’s largest abortion provider. The parameters in the bill also stopped funding from reaching Maine Family Planning, a much smaller provider that also delivers other medical services in the mostly rural state.

Maine Family Planning has informed its nearly 1,000 primary care patients that it will no longer be providing primary care service starting Oct. 31, the network said. The loss of Medicaid funding took about $2 million in reimbursements from the network, and it is no longer able to sustain primary care, it said.

The network “will continue seeing patients who need family planning care, regardless of insurance status, for as long as we are able,” Maine Family Planning said in a statement. The group also provides birth control, sexually transmitted disease testing, cancer screenings and routine OBGYN visits, it said.

“We were caught in this net because we provide abortion care as part of a full range of sexual and reproductive health care at 18 sites. We are proud to provide that care,” said George Hill, president and chief executive officer of Maine Family Planning.

Of the 17,535 visits made to Maine Family Planning’s 18 health centers and mobile medical unit in 2024, 13 per cent were for primary care services, Hill said.

Maine Family Planning has fought the halting of Medicaid dollars in federal court. But it suffered a setback in August when a federal judge ruled against restoring funding during the network's ongoing lawsuit against the Trump administration. The network appealed to a higher court but has yet to receive a response. Hill said the legal fight will continue.

Maine Family Planning is one of three health organizations across the country that the federal government says is barred from receiving Medicaid reimbursements until the end of September 2026 under a provision in President Donald Trump’s tax and spending law. It targets groups that provide abortion and receive more than $800,000 a year in Medicaid reimbursements. Medicaid already did not cover abortion.

Like Maine Family Planning, Planned Parenthood has sued in an effort to restore reimbursements.

Planned Parenthood has said that up to 200 of its clinics might have to close because of the policy change. Some of its nearly 600 clinics have already shut down. In the past week, its Wisconsin affiliate announced that it would stop providing abortion, and the Arizona one took the opposite approach, saying it would halt Medicaid-funded services.

Julia Kehoe, president and CEO of Health Imperatives, which serves about 10,000 patients a year in southeastern Massachusetts, said her organization didn’t realize it was losing Medicaid reimbursements until the government said it was in an August legal filing.

She said she believed the seven clinics in her group were safe from the cuts because they are not primarily a reproductive health organization. The cuts could mean a loss of about $1.8 million a year.

Instead of changing service offerings, Health Imperatives is working on getting additional state funding and donations to make up the difference — and more — with the aim of increasing access to health care.

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Mulvihill reported from Cherry Hill, New Jersey.

– Patrick Whittle and Geoff Mulvihill, The Associated Press