The North Carolina legislature was in Raleigh last week, supposedly to fulfill its role of providing services to the people of our state. With a new state budget three months overdue, looming gaps in Medicaid funding, and a sobering assessment of the work still to be done in western North Carolina one year after Hurricane Helene, there are several critical pieces of legislation that leaders of the legislature could focus lawmakers’ attention on. Instead, the week was mostly filled with partisan politics mirroring the White House’s current priorities. This included inflammatory and misleading bills that claimed to address public safety, threats to illegally redraw congressional maps, and the ever-present attacks on access to reproductive healthcare.

HB192 was initially written and passed in the NC House earlier this spring to address teacher pay. It was rewritten in the NC Senate version to instead follow along with this summer’s federal efforts to bar large reproductive healthcare clinics, particularly Planned Parenthood, from being reimbursed for seeing Medicaid patients. In the North Carolina version of this federal effort, Planned Parenthood is explicitly named, and passage of this bill would create a state law blocking Planned Parenthood South Atlantic from being reimbursed for treating Medicaid patients.

Patients on Medicaid are often quite limited in where they can get affordable and quality healthcare, particularly reproductive healthcare. HB192, no matter what the bill supporters say, is not some “principled” stand against abortion. It’s an attack on people with low incomes, who already struggle to get any kind of healthcare, and now are being barred from accessing mammograms, STI testing, pap smears, and family planning counseling simply because of anti-abortion politics. Blocking people’s access to preventative care and treatment will ultimately result in worse health outcomes for many of our state’s most vulnerable residents, something our elected officials, no matter their political party, should never condone or endorse. 

Attacking access to healthcare, particularly for those who cannot afford health insurance, has been a long-standing project of right-wing interest groups, and HB192 is an extension of these efforts. We wrote in more detail about these efforts in our previous coverage of the U.S. Supreme Court's decision in the Medina v. Planned Parenthood South Atlantic case earlier this year. Unfortunately, too many elected officials continue to play politics with people’s lives.

Because Congress already barred Medicaid reimbursements to Planned Parenthood earlier this summer, HB192, if passed, would have no immediate impact in NC. But if the federal law were repealed or allowed to expire in June 2026, North Carolina would still have this ideological and dangerous ban on its books. 

The NC Senate shamefully used its limited time in Raleigh last week to pass this bill on a straight party-line vote. The NC House still has to vote on this bill, and they may do so when they return to Raleigh on October 20. Let’s use this time to raise our voices, not just in support of reproductive rights and healthcare, but in support of all North Carolinians being able to access the healthcare they need, in the communities where they live, with dignity and safety.