Project 2025 on Abortion and Healthcare: Let’s Get Rid of It!

Project 2025 would both reduce access to healthcare and make it more expensive. It would do this through a series or restrictions, cuts and repeals that include ending abortion access, repealing the Affordable Care Act, privatizing Medicare and drastically reducing Medicaid spending.

Eliminating Abortion Access Federally

Project 2025 suggests two methods for eliminating access to abortion services nationwide as a de facto federal ban. These include:

1) Enforcing the Comstock Act to prevent the shipping of abortion medication or devices.

The Comstock Act is an 1873 anti-vice law that prevents the mailing of obscene materials and abortion paraphernalia, including instruments relating to abortion. The Comstock Act is still on the books, and no one has thought much of it since Roe protected the ability to ship abortion-related materials.

However, since Dobbs overturned Roe, anti-abortion groups, Congressional Republicans, at least two Supreme Court Justices and Project 2025 call for enforcing the Comstock Act to prevent the mailing of abortion medication. This would functionally end abortion in the U.S. without president Trump signing a nationwide ban.

2) Ending FDA approval of chemical abortion drugs like mifepristone. Mifepristone is used in other applications as well as abortions, so this move would not only affect pregnant people.

Gutting Healthcare Access

Rather than trying to make healthcare more affordable for Americans, Project 2025 instead cuts back on access and makes healthcare more expensive, especially for vulnerable populations like people with preexisting conditions. Project 2025 would

1) Repeal the ACA and end consumer protections. Without these protections, insurers could go back to denying coverage, implementing coverage caps, discriminating against women or older individuals and offering junk plans with no real coverage.

2) Withdraw federal Medicaid funding for states that include abortion coverage in private insurance plans. In a further attempt to limit reproductive freedoms, the federal government would punish poor and disabled people by refusing to fund its Medicaid obligations if those states allow private companies to cover abortions.

3) End the government’s ability to negotiate with Medicaid for lower drug prices.

4) Impose caps on individuals’ Medicaid benefits.

5) Drastically reduce Medicaid funding. Project 2025 would implement a long-held dream of Republicans by block-granting Medicaid. This seems innocuous, but it means that the federal government would no longer match states’ Medicaid costs. Now, states are reimbursed for all approved expenses; block-granting would provide states with a fixed reimbursement regardless of expenses. and imposing lifetime caps on Medicaid benefits

6) Allow states to cut the services Medicaid pays for.

7) Make private Medicaid Advantage plans the default enrollment, essentially privatizing the program and costing recipients and the government millions.