Source: Courtesy / HIPHOLLYWOOD
Donald Trump has been declared the winner of the 2024 presidential election. There’s no need to guess what the next four years will look like; Trump advisors and supporters have already laid out their plans for the future of the American government in Project 2025.
Project 2025 is an over 900-page collection of policy proposals that serves as a proposed blueprint for the next Republican administration. Primarily authored by The Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, with contributions from former members of Trump’s administration, the project outlines plans for a massive overhaul of the federal government and with it, government programs and protections for citizens.
One area of daily life and public policy that will be hit the hardest is access to healthcare.
A major goal of Project 2025 is to return to the days before the Affordable Care Act (ACA) was signed into law. The Affordable Care Act, often referred to as Obamacare by its opponents as it was introduced and signed into law during Barack Obama’s first presidential term, has allowed states to expand access and eligibility to people with low income or those who’ve lost their employee sponsored health care. Under the ACA, people were allowed to stay on their parent or caregiver’s health insurance until they turned 26 years old, prescription drug prices lowered, and access to healthcare for millions of previously uninsured Americans was restored. Around 19 percent of Americans are currently covered by Medicaid or Medicare, an increase from 2020. Moving away from the ACA would leave millions without life saving health insurance and that’s part of Project 2025’s plan.
Reproductive health is also in danger under Project 2025, which mentions the word “abortion” over 200 times. While the document does not call for a nationwide abortion ban, and Trump has promised not to sign such a ban into law, there are severe restrictions proposed in the project that essentially make receiving or administering a safe, legal abortion impossible.
Project 2025 urges the FDA to reverse its approval of mifepristone and misoprostol, two pills commonly used in medical abortions. The project urges the Department of Justice to criminalize abortion under the Comstock Act of 1873, an old law considered unenforceable for over a century that makes it a federal crime to mail anything having to do with abortion. That includes not only abortion pills, but also any medical equipment that could be used in an abortion procedure like speculums, dilators, stirrups, beds, and more which impedes not only access to safe abortions, but also access to effective medical care for all people.
Speaking of making medical care more difficult, Project 2025 proposes “conscience laws” which will allow medical providers to deny patients life saving care based on their personal beliefs, not what’s best for the patient. Meanwhile under the proposed restrictions on reproductive health, medical providers can face criminal charges for performing life saving abortions. Furthermore, under Project 2025, the federal government could expand surveillance of pregnant people, gathering data on the outcome of those pregnancies and putting people at risk of criminalization for their own reproductive choices.
When it comes to sexual health care and gender care, Project 2025 has plans for that, too. Project 2025 promotes heterosexual marriage and will deny single parents or same-sex couples access to medical interventions that would allow them to become parents such as in-vitro fertilization (IVF). The document, co-authored by White Christian Nationalists who prioritized religion-based policies, suggests that the department of Health and Human Services should “maintain a biblically based, social science-reinforced definition of marriage and family.” Project 2025 outlines plans to roll back federal protections against sex and gender discrimination and outlaws materials that affirm gender identity or LGBTQIA+ lifestyles as “pornographic.”
Trump has repeatedly denied any association with Project 2025 and its authors but his own platform and campaign promises can prove to be just as harmful for American healthcare. Throughout all three of his campaigns, Trump has repeatedly promised to “replace” the Affordable Care Act, while having no clear plan or promise on what he intends to replace it with. While he insists he will not sign an abortion ban into law, Trump takes credit for appointing the Supreme Court Justices who helped overturn Roe V. Wade in 2022. His platform on education blatantly calls for cutting federal funding to schools that teach critical race theory or “radical gender ideology” and he promised on the campaign trail to ask Congress to require that only two genders are recognized at birth.
Project 2025 and a second Trump term present a clear threat to public healthcare in America and public policy as it’s currently understood in this country. The proposed blueprint for the future of government as well as Trump’s own campaign promises puts several civil liberties at risk and essentially renders the legislative system of checks and balances obsolete. It’s a nightmare scenario for the land of the free, where freedoms that were once taken for granted risk undergoing extreme restriction. And, after all the votes are counted from the 2024 election, that nightmare is on its way to becoming America’s reality.
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