AUSTIN — Texas’ health department will investigate billing irregularities and end its contracts with an anti-abortion group that failed to provide health care to the number of women it promised the state it could serve.

The Texas Health and Human Services Commission announced Friday that it was terminating two contracts with the Heidi Group for the state's Family Planning Program and Healthy Texas Women, which offer free and low-cost family-planning services to low-income women.

The Heidi Group will also have to repay the commission $29,431, and the commission's office of inspector general will determine if the group owes an additional $1.1 million.

The Heidi Group served only 3,300 clients out of nearly 70,000 it told the state it would cover in fiscal 2017, according to data from the commission. Despite this, the group was awarded new contracts for fiscal 2019, which began Sept. 1.

But after a regular review, spokeswoman Carrie Williams said, the agency decided to end the partnership effective Dec. 11.

“We worked with the Heidi Group over time on its performance, and we have determined that the Heidi Group is unable to meet the standards of a successful contractor with us,” Williams wrote Friday in an email. “Contract termination was in the best interest of the state and the clients we serve.”

She said that the department tried to help the Heidi Group through site visits and reviews but that it continued to fall short in the areas of contract compliance, service administration, and financial and administrative management.

The Heidi Group is one of dozens of health care providers the state selected to oversee Healthy Texas Women and the Family Planning Program. Clients of those programs either aren’t eligible for Medicaid or lose coverage 60 days after giving birth.

The Round Rock-based Heidi Group’s role was to steer those women to health care providers in its network, including providers in Arlington, DeSoto, Fort Worth, Lewisville and Mansfield.

Founder Carol Everett says on her Facebook page that she had an abortion in 1973, shortly after the Roe v. Wade Supreme Court decision, and that she ran four abortion clinics in Dallas-Fort Worth. She has since become an anti-abortion activist who helps women find alternative options.

Abortion rights supporters said the group is not “remotely qualified” to meet women’s health care needs and only seeks to discourage them from ending their pregnancies.

Aimee Arrambide, executive director of abortion rights group NARAL Pro-Choice Texas, said in a news release that the state “went to extremes to withhold funds from qualified providers in order to award undeserved millions of taxpayer dollars to an ideological, anti-choice organization with ties to fake women’s health centers."

The state did not contract with any providers that offered abortion services.

“We encourage the Legislature to remove the restrictions on qualified providers from participating in these programs in order to prevent this sort of waste in the future,” Arrambide said.

Williams said Healthy Texas Women and the Family Planning Program will continue to serve thousands of women in the state with the help of providers other than the Heidi Group.

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