The United States’ public health infrastructure is among the public institutions left hobbled by the Supreme Court’s 2024-2025 term, which ended on June 27.

In its final days of work, the Court’s conservative majority blessed states’ efforts to defund Planned Parenthood and affirmed that the nation’s top anti-vaccine crusader, Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., has great discretion to decide which preventative medical services are covered by the Affordable Care Act.

The end result: The nation’s health-care system is under acute risk of collapse into the corrupt and absurd. Here’s what you need to know.

Let’s start with Medina v. Planned Parenthood South Atlantic, a June 26 decision that upheld South Carolina’s 2018 attempt to kick Planned Parenthood out of its state Medicaid program because the state’s Republican lawmakers oppose abortion.

Medicaid is a joint federal-state health insurance program that covers many lower-income individuals and people with disabilities. More than 70 million Americans are on Medicaid, according to the New York Times. It is also the nation’s largest source of insurance for pregnant people.

With narrow exceptions, Medicaid does not cover abortion; the Hyde Amendment, which first took effect in 1977, prevents federal dollars from covering the care. Many states, including South Carolina, block state funding for abortion as well. But Planned Parenthood affiliates offer many services beyond abortion that Medicaid does cover, including cancer screenings and treatment for sexually transmitted infections. Many people who get that kind of care at Planned Parenthood centers use Medicaid to pay for it.

Nonetheless, the Court has ruled that in effect South Carolina can halt Medicaid funding to health-care providers like Planned Parenthood on ideological grounds because they also provide abortion care. The 6-3 ruling will allow other states to follow South Carolina’s lead, and there’s currently nothing Medicaid beneficiaries who get their health care at Planned Parenthood can do to stop them.

“At a minimum, it will deprive Medicaid recipients in South Carolina of their only meaningful way of enforcing a right that Congress has expressly granted to them,” Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson........

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