Quick Take
Santa Cruz's downtown Planned Parenthood clinic closed suddenly Thursday, one of five locations shuttered by the organization’s Mar Monte affiliate after a federal court ruling allowed most Medicaid cuts to the health care provider to take effect across the country.
The downtown Santa Cruz Planned Parenthood health center abruptly closed its doors Thursday after a federal court order allowed Medicaid funding cuts to go ahead for most of the abortion provider’s clinics in California.
Planned Parenthood Mar Monte closed five offices, including Santa Cruz, South San Francisco, San Mateo, Gilroy and Madera, which collectively served 23,000 patients in the fiscal year that ended June 30.
Mar Monte is the largest Planned Parenthood affiliate in the country and oversees 35 health centers in California and Nevada, including the Santa Cruz and Watsonville offices. It laid off 62 employees on Thursday and has cut at least 120 staff in total since July 4, Andrew Adams, Mar Monte chief of staff, said in an interview with Lookout.
“It’s a great setback for our organization, but it’s not the end of Mar Monte’s ability to provide sexual reproductive health care,” Adams said. “There’s a lot of work ahead in the fight for our organizational survival and our ability to care for patients, but these devastating decisions that we were forced to make today to close the five health centers … we hope will ensure that we can stay in this fight, and ensure that we’re still around no matter what.”
The Santa Cruz clinic provided a wide range of health services for low-income residents beyond abortions, including prenatal care, mental health treatment and family health care. “Abortion is just 3% of our services — 97% of the time, we’re providing contraception, breast exams, Pap tests, treating sexually transmitted infections,” Gail Michaelis-Ow, a longtime nurse practitioner with Planned Parenthood Mar Monte, told Lookout in 2022.
Clinics near other health care providers that could “pick up the slack,” or that had outdated infrastructure, were chosen to be closed first, Adams said.
The new downtown public library mixed-use project was one reason why the Santa Cruz operation was picked for closure, Adams said. The clinic at Cathcart Street and Pacific Avenue fronts onto the parking lot that is slated to be closed for the library construction. Adams said patients who require services were being directed to Planned Parenthood’s Watsonville location, which remains open.
By 5:30 p.m. Thursday, the clinic on Pacific Avenue was closed, with all of its lights turned off. Both the building’s exterior door and the clinic’s second-floor entrance had a piece of paper taped to them notifying people of the closure and telling patients to book a telehealth appointment via the organization’s website, or to visit another health center.
The closures are an attempt to put Planned Parenthood Mar Monte on better financial footing, Adams said. The organization faces a projected $100 million deficit this year and is forecasting a 50% drop in revenue, largely as a result of cuts to Medicaid reimbursements.
The affiliate has 35 health centers serving more than 300,000 people, and relies on Medicaid reimbursements for a majority of its revenue. Following the Medicare cuts, Mar Monte lost $1.7 million from salaries and operational expenses.
Planned Parenthood Federation of America sued the Trump administration on behalf of its membership earlier in the month over provisions in the congressional budget reconciliation bill that effectively ban Medicaid reimbursements to large health care clinics that provide abortions.
On Monday, a federal judge in Massachusetts issued a preliminary injunction blocking Medicaid cuts from taking effect for certain providers, but the ruling applies to only a handful of Planned Parenthood health centers in the country. Clinics in California were not covered by the ruling, allowing the cuts to proceed across the state. A previous temporary restraining order that had prevented the cuts from going into effect has since expired.
County Supervisor Justin Cummings, whose district includes Santa Cruz, called the clinic’s closure “really tragic” and said any attempt to bring it back would be challenging.
“Once you close a facility they have to renegotiate leases, you have to rehire people. It’s going to be more expensive,” he said. “And so the loss of this level of health care in our community is really going to be really negatively impacting, not just low income people, but in particular women and people who rely on these services.”
To try to fend off insolvency, Planned Parenthood is in talks with the state for funding and is going back to donors who have opened their wallets to Planned Parenthood before, Adams said. Last year, Mar Monte received $16 million in donations last year, and facing steep cuts in federal funding, it is asking supporters to “dig deeper” than they ever have before.
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