Attorney General Ken Paxton secured a major nationwide legal victory to protect the integrity of states’ Medicaid programs for both hospitals and the millions of Americans who rely on Medicaid. This victory struck down a rule from the Biden Administration’s U.S. Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Service (“CMS”) that sought to expand federal control of States’ Medicaid funding mechanisms.
“This is not only a win for the integrity of Texas health care, but it’s also a defeat of Joe Biden’s unlawful overreach. This rule is just one example of the Biden administration’s misuse of CMS, which was employed to target conservative states,” said Attorney General Paxton. “Joe Biden attempted to use federal agencies to hurt our economies, undermine our health care systems, destroy our energy industries, and target numerous other areas where our commonsense policies deliver prosperity. My office will continue to work relentlessly to uproot and overturn any Biden-era regulations that rewrote the law and threaten the care Texans depend on and our freedoms.”
CMS’s rule targeted Texas’s Local Provider Participation Funds (“LPPFs”), which allow hospital districts to collect uniform payments from providers to help pay the State’s Medicaid costs. These agreements were permitted by the Legislature in 2013 and are allowed by federal law. With the rule and various other bulletins, Biden’s CMS attempted to force Texas and other states to police purely private contracts, imposing unlawful federal overreach that could have led to a massive cut in critical Medicaid funding.
The Office of the Attorney General secured a ruling determining that federal law applies only to contracts involving states, not private contracts between healthcare providers. The judge also ruled that CMS lacked the authority to restrict Texas’s flexibility to allow these private agreements.
With this legal victory, Attorney General Paxton dismantled a key aspect of Joe Biden’s attempt to undermine the states, protected funding essential to sustaining Texas’s Medicaid program, and reinforced the right of private providers to operate free from unlawful federal control
To read the ruling, click here.