Continuing with The General Welfare in Project 2025. Still in Chapter 14, starting with the Food and Drug Administration (p. 456). I’ll go over this ground as lightly as possible, but I want to get through it, so this is long. Get yourself a soothing beverage and settle in.
Summary: get Big Pharma out of our pockets (yep, I’m down with that); reform the approval process (yep); promote and simplify generic drug manufacturing (seems reasonable); and …
Oh damn it, here they are again. “Abortion pills pose the single greatest threat to unborn children in a post-Roe world (p. 457).”
No. That is a lie.
The single greatest threat to unborn children is poor prenatal care. The second greatest threat is violence. “Pregnancy was associated with a more than sixfold increased risk of homicide among the 10–19-year age group and a 65% increase in risk in the 20–24-year age group.” CITE
Why do you suppose that risk skyrockets? Because people panic when there’s an unplanned pregnancy, especially when it’s unwanted. When people panic, they’re more likely to be impulsive, and when they’re impulsive, they are by definition not thinking through all the consequences of their actions. This is when people lash out, and this is when people get hurt. For every homicide, there are hundreds (if not thousands) of physical assaults and other forms of abuse.
Back to the summary. There’s a lot here about restricting medication abortion and the morning-after pill, plus increasing mandatory reporting so the government can go after medical personnel and the pregnant people they serve (through p. 459). Where’s your liberty now?
Then they want to import vaccines (why not, if they work); reform the NIH to prohibit use of fetal tissue or embryonic stem cells in research plus prohibit any research that doesn’t support the gender binary (p. 461) and strip language recognizing gender diversity (p. 462).
Next, “Medicare and Medicaid … operate as runaway entitlements that stifle medical innovation, encourage fraud, and impeded cost containment, in addition to which their fiscal future is in peril (p. 463).”
Okay, that’s actually true. These programs do need to be massively reformed. P25’s “four goals and principles (p. 463):
Increase Medicare beneficiaries’ control of their health care.
Reduce regulatory burdens on doctors.
Ensure sustainability and value for beneficiaries and taxpayers.
Reduce waste, fraud, and abuse.”
No objection to those goals. How does P25 want to achieve them, though? First, pay the same for a procedure done in an outpatient or inpatient setting, where that procedure is equivalently safe either way. No argument!
Then, oh crap, “HHS needs to restore and enhance conscience protection regulations … (p. 464).” This means letting people who receive government funds deny services on the basis of their religion. NO. A medical practitioner’s religion is irrelevant to their duty to provide care.
Don’t want to provide certain types of care? Don’t take a job at a facility where that care is offered. Simple.
The document then switches back to administrative changes recommended, most of which aren’t unreasonable. Oh, but wait, here it is. They want to gut the Affordable Care Act (p. 466), reform financing and funding of Medicaid, rewrite eligibility standards, and “incentivize personal responsibility (p. 467).”
After some more blathering about insurance access (including allowing Medicaid funds to be used for private insurance) through p. 471, they’re back at abortion and ways to prevent accidentally giving a dollar to facilities that provide it.
Note, there’s already a federal law against using tax dollars to pay for abortion services. And I don’t disagree with that. I personally don’t think tax dollars should pay for much in the way of elective healthcare – including Viagra or Ozempic – and we’ll get to my personal take on this later, if we all survive.
But P25 wants to prevent Planned Parenthood, specifically, from receiving any Medicaid funds (p. 471), even though a Planned Parenthood clinic may be the only OBGYN provider within a day’s drive for some Americans, especially those without insurance or whose only insurance is Medicaid.
If you really want to protect unborn children, fund the NGO providing prenatal care. And keep anti-choice protestors away while you’re at it.
And they want to “Withdraw Medicaid funds for states that require abortion insurance,” quoting the Weldon Amendment, which appears to say that if a state requires abortion coverage in private insurance plans, it is somehow discriminating against pro-life health entities or insurers (p. 472).
Choice is not discrimination. Choice is the opposite of discrimination. A person who doesn’t approve of abortion is perfectly free to go to a healthcare facility that doesn’t provide abortions. They are not free to say “I don’t approve of that, so you can’t provide access to it.”
The anti-choice demands continue on p. 473. P25 wants to audit all of Medicaid, basically, to find out where a dollar might have accidentally been spent on the termination of a pregnancy, even if that termination was considered medically necessary. How is this a good use of tax dollars? It’s punitive, pointless, and disciminatory.
They slip in a little complaint about Medicare coverage for transgender care (p. 474), bounce back to the Weldon amendment, then complain about the nondiscrimination provisions in the ACA which protect nonbinary identities (p. 475), then complain about Biden’s Covid-19 vaccine mandate, then jump to anti-poverty programs (p. 476), abstinence-only sex education, and adoption reform (p. 477).
Refugee resettlement: P25 wants to move it to DHS (that department they want to dismantle) instead of HHS (p. 478). AFDC, established in 1935, is blamed for single-parent households; P25 thinks government funds should go to promoting marriage. Have they looked at how many single-parent households are post-divorce? Just wondering. They want to give fathers, even non-resident fathers, more rights and more tax breaks. Marriage marriage marriage (into p. 481). Then they want to “Protect faith-based grant recipients from religious liberty violations … (p. 481).”
There shouldn’t be any faith-based grant recipients. No tax dollars to churches, period.
More on fatherhood and marriage, but where a parent “does not make a sincere or serious effort to be involved in the child’s upbringing, termination of parental rights … should be swift (p. 482).” How does this square with the majority of US states allowing a rapist to sue for parental rights?
Back to destroying programs with a history of success for families with children: “Eliminate the Head Start program (p. 482).” Reform, sure. Eliminate? No.
Support palliative care and oppose physician-assisted suicide (p. 482). Collect more medical data and surveil telehealth (p. 483). “Restore Trump religious and moral exemptions to the contraceptive mandate … (p. 483).” Again, if you don’t want to provide care to everyone equally, get a different job. “The contraceptive mandate issued under Obamacare has been the source of years of egregious attacks on many Americans’ religious and moral beliefs (p. 484).”
Nobody is forcing people to take contraception. The fact that Person A uses contraception is not an attack on Person B. It does not injure them in any way. It is none of their goddamn business.
Then they’re back at “fertility awareness-based methods,” better known as A Surefire Way to Get Pregnant When You Least Want To, and eliminating men’s preventive services – meaning condoms shouldn’t be covered by insurance (p. 485). WTAF. Ban coverage for gender-affirming care, ban the week-after pill, make sure that medical professional, midwife and doula training doesn’t accidentally cover how to terminate a pregnancy, prioritize funding home-based childcare (through p. 486).
Expand and reform the Indian Health Service (no argument there). Improve rural healthcare by deregulating, not by funding more clinics or pharmacies (p. 487). Reform the office of the Secretary of HHS. Most importantly, “eliminate the HHS Reproductive Healthcare Access Task Force and install a pro-life task force … (p. 489).”
Do you believe me yet about the abortion ban? Plus:
“[T]he Secretary should proudly state that men and women are biological realities … and that married men and women are the ideal, natural family structure … (p. 489).”
Do you believe me yet about erasing nonbinary identities and marginalizing nontraditional households?
On page 489 we move to more of the offices involved in healthcare administration, with some suggestions for consolidating positions and missions, before returning to a call for more research to support an abortion ban, reframing Title X, and guaranteeing “the right of conscience and religious freedom of health care workers … (p. 491).”
On pages 491-495 we swerve briefly to disaster preparedness and response before moving on to the HHS Office of General Counsel and Office for Civil Rights. Most of the priorities here relate to banning abortion, expanding “conscience” exemptions, and denying nonbinary identities.
Nowhere in this long and depressing chapter is there an actionable plan for reducing the sprawl and the cost of Medicare and Medicaid.
Instead, what we get over and over again is: ban abortion; let healthcare workers deny care on the basis of their religion; deny and erase nonbinary identities.
When someone says something twenty times, it is intentional, and you should believe them.
People, if you really want someone else’s church making your medical decisions for you, by all means pretend everything is fine.
If you don’t, then find your elected officials and TELL THEM SO.