From eliminating the Affordable Care Act (ACA) to cutting Medicaid benefits, increasing Medicare Part D prescription drug prices and eliminating reproductive freedom nationwide, Donald Trump’s Project 2025 would have disastrous, deadly consequences on our country’s health care system.
Project 2025 is the blueprint for Trump if he wins a second term. Written by many of his former advisers, the 900-page document contains hundreds of policy proposals that would benefit the wealthy and corporations at the expense of working families and give Trump unprecedented executive power and control over our lives. Read our overview blog to learn about all the harms this blueprint would cause if implemented.
Instead of seeking to reduce health care costs, which is what most Americans want, the policy proposals in Project 2025 would have the opposite effect: they would cut back on medical care for those who can least afford it, increase prescription drug costs and leave more people without health insurance.
The Trump agenda would establish lifetime caps or time limits on receiving Medicaid. It would require states to implement stricter eligibility determinations for Medicaid, leaving many needy people without coverage.
As the Center for American Progress (CAP), an independent policy institute, puts it, “Project 2025’s Medicaid proposal is a threat to the health and economic security of millions of Americans. Stripping people of their Medicaid benefits would leave many low-income enrollees … without any affordable coverage options, forcing them to forgo essential medical care and undermining their ability to work.”
The Trump agenda would also repeal part of the Inflation Reduction Act that allows the government to negotiate directly with pharmaceutical companies to lower the costs of prescription drugs and improve access to lifesaving medication for seniors receiving Medicare. The price of insulin, which has decreased for everyone after it was capped at $35 per month for Medicare recipients, could very well surge again.
By repealing the ACA, Trump’s agenda would allow health insurance companies to once again deny coverage based on preexisting conditions. Such a move would leave tens of millions of people without health coverage. Just this year, 21.3 million people signed up for insurance just this year through the ACA marketplace.
Project 2025 would also restrict women’s access to contraception, inserting itself in their reproductive lives. Among other things, Trump’s plan would make it harder for women to access no-cost emergency contraception, affecting nearly 48 million women of reproductive age, according to CAP. Emergency contraception is widely used, completely safe and effective at preventing a pregnancy before it occurs.
But that’s not where Trump’s plan to take away reproductive freedom ends. Project 2025 also suggests using the 1873 Comstock Act to criminalize the mailing of abortion-related items, including pills for medication abortion.
As CAP puts it, “Far-right extremists are focused on misapplying Comstock to halt medication abortion via mail because doing so would cut off abortion access so severely as to function as a de facto ban.”