H.R. 4796: Restoring Essential Healthcare Act

H.R. 4796 is seventeen lines long and does two things. It repeals section 71113 of Public Law 119-21 — the 2025 reconciliation law — and it says that any Medicaid care furnished by an entity that section blocked, between the day that law was enacted and the day this one would be, must be paid for as if the block had never been written.

Section 71113 named no organization. It defined a "prohibited entity" by four traits, measured as of October 1, 2025: a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, an essential community provider primarily delivering family planning and reproductive health care, one that provides abortions beyond the exceptions federal law already allows, and one that took in more than $800,000 in combined federal and state Medicaid reimbursement in fiscal 2023. Affiliates, subsidiaries, successors and clinics were swept in alongside it. KFF's tracking of the resulting litigation identifies the providers actually blocked as Planned Parenthood affiliates, Maine Family Planning and Health Imperatives.

The cutoff reached every service those providers billed Medicaid for, not only abortion. KFF found that in 2023, nearly one in five female Medicaid enrollees got their contraceptive care at a Planned Parenthood clinic.

The restriction ran for exactly one year from enactment and then lapsed in early July 2026 without Congress having to do anything. The courts did not shorten it. A district court enjoined the provision in July 2025, the First Circuit paused that injunction in September and blocked it outright that December, and the cutoff was in force for most of its life.

That calendar is what H.R. 4796 now turns on. The half of the bill that repeals the restriction has been overtaken by events — the restriction is already gone. What is left is the retroactive half: about a year of Medicaid claims that were never paid, which this bill would order paid.

The bill attaches no appropriation, no payment rate, no cap and no penalty. It covers care furnished under a state Medicaid plan and under a waiver of that plan, so managed care and demonstration arrangements are inside it. It offers no estimate of what reopening those claims would cost, and no CBO score has been published for it.