Column: Healthcare — and not just reproductive care — was on the ballot, and it lost big

It was perhaps natural that campaign coverage of the presidential candidates’ healthcare policies began and ended with abortion rights; since June 2022, when the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, 20 states have banned abortions or enacted draconian restrictions on the procedure. Trump has specifically said he would not support a national abortion ban “under any circumstances,” but that leaves open a multitude of ways he could achieve that goal by another name, whether by applying an ancient federal law to constrain the shipment of abortion pills, installing reproductive rights opponents at federal healthcare agencies as he did in his first term, or some other means. GENDER: Trump made gender-related medical treatments a target of his campaign, spinning a deranged fantasy about schools subjecting children to gender-changing surgery behind their parents’ backs; Project 2025 disdains what it calls “the new woke gender ideology, which has as a principal tenet ‘gender affirming care’ and ‘sex-change’ surgeries on minors.” This parallels laws passed in several red states barring any gender-affirming care for minors. During his campaign he promised, “I will not give one penny to any school that has a vaccine mandate or a mask mandate.” It’s possible that this reflects the sway that Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has exercised over Trump, who has promised to place RFK Jr. in a policymaking role over healthcare. The project rails against the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the National Institutes of Health — the country’s premier public health agencies — for “the irrational, destructive, un-American mask and vaccine mandates that were imposed upon an ostensibly free people during the COVID-19 pandemic.” It also claims that “masks provide little to no benefit in preventing the spread of viruses and might even be counterproductive,” a statement that is unadulterated BS.