Project 2025 Will Kill Us All

Medicare for All

If there’s one thing everyone is talking about these days, it’s JD Vance’s affinity for couches. But if there are two things everyone is talking about, it’s Vance’s couches and Project 2025. You may be wondering, what is this mysterious project, and what does it have to do with me? Well, it turns out, a lot! Project 2025 is the right-wing map to a terrifying future, and if its proponents have their way, the future of healthcare is especially grim. Today, we’re doing a deep dive into what this thing is and how it could change healthcare as we know it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a4kYQ-Hh5pY

Show Notes

Gillian Mason, Healthcare-NOW’s Executive Director, has read Project 2025 so you don’t have to. P25 is the brainchild of the Heritage Foundation, the think tank founded in 1973 because conservative businessmen thought Richard Nixon was too liberal (remember that Nixon created the EPA and advocated for a better national health plan than Obamacare, so they weren’t all wrong). They really hit their stride during the Reagan administration when they wrote his policy playbook, which they called the “Mandate for Leadership” — Reagan implemented or initiated about 60 percent of the 2,000 policy changes they recommended. They do this Mandate for Leadership report now every presidential cycle, and it’s been pretty influential whenever a Republican wins.

These people are unabashed fascists. We use that term a lot kind of casually but these guys literally fit the Merriam-Webster Webster dictionary definition: “a political philosophy, movement, or regime that exalts nation and often race above the individual and that stands for a centralized autocratic government headed by a dictatorial leader, severe economic and social regimentation, and forcible suppression of opposition.” The Heritage Foundation’s whole deal is consolidating all authority in the office of the president so he can implement severe economic and social regimentation based on nationalism and barely-veiled-when-it’s-not-just-blatant racism.

Project 2025 It’s the “Mandate for Leadership” for this election season, so it’s supposed to be a template for Trump’s next four years. Although reading Project 2025 would make you think it was a room full of monkeys at typewriters type situation, it was actually written by a room full of Trump’s cronies. Hundreds of people contributed to writing and researching this thing, and a hefty percentage were former Trump appointees and employees of the administration.

Also, VP pick JD Vance just wrote the foreword for an upcoming book by Kevin Roberts, the head of the P25 team. Vance has also been a mouthpiece for some of the wilder shit in P25.

Trump claims he really doesn’t know much about P25. But it’s still worth talking about because COINCIDENTALLY it turns out that a lot of his policies are the same as the ones in P25.

The Premise: The liberals in Washington, in cahoots with Chinese Communists and the “totalitarian cult known today as ‘The Great Awokening’” have put “the very moral foundations of our society are in peril.” (This is not an exaggeration— it’s literally all on the first page)

P25 has 4 main goals:

• Restore the family as the centerpiece of American life and protect our children.
• Dismantle the administrative state and return self-governance to the American people.
• Defend our nation’s sovereignty, borders, and bounty against global threats.
• Secure our God-given individual rights to live freely—what our Constitution calls ‘the Blessings of Liberty.’”

All the recommendations are laid out systematically according to the different areas of the federal government they want to control (The Executive Office, Department of Homeland Security, Intelligence Services, Media Agencies, etc.) We’ll mainly be focusing on healthcare today but context is important so here are a few highlights of what they’re planning to give you some flavor:

• Reclassify most federal employees as appointees
• Mass arrests and deportations of undocumented immigrants
• Defund PBS
• Reinstate work requirements for the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants & Children (WIC) and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP).
• Get rid of protections for trans folks in Title 9.
• Roll back regulations on the production of baby formula

So what do these policy geniuses have to say about healthcare? Their overall goals are:

• “Protecting Life, Conscience, and Bodily Integrity”: in a nutshell, a freakout about sex and gender and scientific research that bothers the consciences of conservative Christians.
• “Empowering Patient Choices and Provider Autonomy”: more free market competition gobbledegook about healthcare. We know that health isn’t a commodity. We don’t make decisions on health the same way we do when buying a tv or car. You can’t diagnose yourself and shop for bargains, or keep using that old busted kidney until Best Buy has a new one on sale. You also can’t comparison shop for health insurance. Markets just don’t work in healthcare. When they talk about choices, they want you to have the choice to create more profit for insurance companies. Their philosophy is that government programs like Medicare and Medicaid victimize poor people by making them depend on the state, therefore having more “choices” of private insurance are inherently better for poor people, or something.
• “Promoting Stable and Flourishing Married Families”: they are very worried about fatherless families, government subsidization of single-motherhood and disincetivization of work. This section also includes 50 Ways to Stop an Abortion including bringing back the Comstock Act of 1873.
• “Preparing for the Next Health Emergency”: they are still so mad about the COVID-19 pandemic, they are dying to make sure we do absolutely nothing.
• “Instituting Greater Transparency, Accountability, and Oversight”: This one is kind of interesting – they’re mad at Big PhRMA because vaccines are bad, so they want to stop private corporations, including Big PhRMA, from “capturing” federal agencies by putting their money into public-private partnerships. They also proclaim “we must shut and lock the revolving door between government and Big Pharma. Regulators should have a long “cooling off period” on their contracts (15 years would not be too long) that prevents them from working for companies they have regulated. Similarly, pharmaceutical company executives should be restricted from moving from industry into positions within regulatory agencies.” This sounds pretty good to us, actually. Unfortunately they also want to stop government negotiations over prescription drug prices.

So our takeaways: ever since the GOP tried to overturn the ACA, they haven’t had a coherent health policy. Project 2025 really doesn’t move the needle. It’s mostly culture war nonsense that does not project any kind of vision of what they want to see in the future. While most opinion polls show that healthcare costs are still a major issue for American voters, they don’t touch on the topic in Project 2025. They would privatize all of our public programs, making more profits for insurance companies and putting fewer resources into patient care.

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This show is a project of the Healthcare NOW Education Fund! If you want to support our work, you can donate at our website, healthcare-now.org.