Project 2025 Tracker / What’s done, what’s next

14. Department of Health and Human Services · Notable

Approve Section 1115 waivers excluding abortion providers from Medicaid

Not started

472 14. Department of Health and Human Services

“CMS should resolve pending Section 1115 waivers from Idaho, South Carolina, and Tennessee, which, like Texas in January 2022, are seeking both to prohibit abortion providers from participating in state-run Medicaid programs and to work with other states to do the same.”

What has happened

  1. Not started

    No allowlisted record shows CMS resolving the Idaho, South Carolina or Tennessee Section 1115 requests to exclude abortion providers from their Medicaid programs. CMS's own Section 1115 demonstration list was read on 2026-09-03 and it turns the negative into a positive statement of fact: **Idaho Family Planning Referrals** is status *Pending*, with Approval and Effective dates "Not provided" and an administrative record that stops at a CMS completeness letter of 2019-10-28; **South Carolina Transitioning to Preconception Care** is status *Pending*, with a pending application of 2018-08-23 and a completeness letter of 2018-09-06; and Tennessee's only Section 1115 is **TennCare III**, also listed *Pending*. A control-verified keyword search of the entire 1115/1915 waiver list for `abortion` returns 0 of 0 (nonsense control 0; positive control `family planning` 210). None of the three has been resolved. **Dating caveat:** the waiver-list and application pages carry no date of their own and their newest administrative-record entries are 2019-10-28 and 2018-09-06, before the window, so this is a state observation of 2026-09-03 rather than a dated event, and carries no Evidence item. The earlier note that Section 1115 approval and denial letters could not be read is corrected: medicaid.gov opens to a bare `curl`; the only in-window Federal Register record touching one of the three States is a hearing notice on Idaho state plan amendment 24-0015, which concerns postpartum coverage for pregnancies ending in abortion rather than provider exclusion. The substance the waivers were sought for arrived by other means - Medina v. Planned Parenthood South Atlantic and Public Law 119-21 section 71113, both #1298's Evidence - which does not resolve the three applications. Negative search recorded in `docs/research/ch-14.md` under the round-2 (ticket 16) cluster searches.

    No action found yet. This entry is the starting point, not a finding.

Research log

What was searched, and what didn’t count as evidence

Research notes

  • Queries: Federal Register “section 1115 demonstration” since 2025-01-20 → 8 documents, none a waiver approval; the HHS notices in the Federal Register that we keep and search, searched for Idaho, South Carolina or Tennessee → one hit (FR 2025-02938, 2025-02-24, read in full at https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/FR-2025-02-24/html/2025-02938.htm).
  • The CMS Section 1115 demonstration list was opened on 2026-09-03, at medicaid.gov/medicaid/section-1115-demo/demonstration-and-waiver-list, filtered per state, plus the two detail pages for Idaho (<medicaid.gov/medicaid/section-1115-demo/demonstration-and-waiver-list/81506>) and South Carolina (<medicaid.gov/medicaid/section-1115-demo/demonstration-and-waiver-list/83156>). None of the three pages carries a date of its own, which is why the finding sits in the Status note as a state observation rather than as Evidence.
Action
other
Object
pending Section 1115 waivers from Idaho, South Carolina, and Tennessee
ID
1301