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Democrats continue to keep the pressure on Donald Trump and the broader conservative movement over the ending of federal protections for abortion rights — but a new memo from the national party indicates that those attacks may expand to encompass another issue: healthcare access.
A memo provided to The Indepdendent and issued by the party on Friday outlines angles of attack surrounding the Trump administration’s 2017 push to repeal the Affordable Care Act, better known as Obamacare. That scheme, which represented a long-held goal of the right under Obama’s presidency, ultimately failed after three Republican senators broke ranks with their party to kill the GOP’s repeal effort.
The drama that played out on the Senate floor — culminating in John McCain’s famous “thumbs down” — belied a larger argument around the issue of healthcare access: the mandated coverage for Americans with pre-existing conditions that was central to the Affordable Care Act’s legislation and expanded coverage for millions of Americans — people who subsequently would have been ripped off their plans, were it repealed. A so-called “skinny repeal” bill offered by the GOP in 2017 would have kept that central pre-existing conditions tenet while making other sweeping changes to the bill, including a restructure of Medicare. Experts estimated at the time that millions still would have lost access to health insurance under the Republican plan, and as a result it was sunk.
Now, Democrats on the national committee are coming out swinging against their Republican foes over healthcare costs and access to no-cost emergency contraception under the Affordable Care Act. Pointing to parts of the much-maligned Project 2025 that call for an end to FDA approval for mifepristone and other efforts to restrict contraception, the DNC says in the memo that the rollback of access to free emergency contraception would be a blow to the rights of 48 million women who access such treatment, not to mention the milions more who access birth control through subsidized health care plans.
Citing Planned Parenthood and other organizations, it notes that contraception accounted for as much as 30%-44% of out-of-pocket healthcare costs for American women prior to the passage of Obamacare.
Trump himself has denounced Project 2025 and made multiple efforts to distance himself from the conservative super-group through his public remarks and campaign aides. But the plan was clearly designed with a second Trump presidency in mind and outlines priorities indisputably held by the groups that make up the core of the conservative movement — and ones tied to many of his current and former staffers.
“Thanks to the Affordable Care Act, most Americans receive contraception without paying out-of-pocket costs – it’s one of the law’s most popular provisions,” said DNC press secretary Emilia Rowland on Friday.
“But with Trump hellbent on terminating the ACA if he retakes power, more than 60 million women could lose their access to free birth control under their health plans, and his Project 2025 agenda would rip away access to no-cost emergency contraception for 48 million women,” said the DNC spokesperson. “This election, Americans have a clear choice: give Trump and Vance unlimited power over our bodies and futures by tearing away access to Plan B and birth control and raising health care costs, or elect Vice President Harris and Governor Walz to defend our freedoms and fight to make access to affordable reproductive care a reality for all.”
The Independent has reached out to the Trump campaign for comment.
The DNC’s sharpened edge on the issue of healthcare access may be energized in part by Trump’s declaration that he has only a “concept of a plan” for replacing Obamacare when asked about the issue at the presidential debate in Philadelphia.
The moment was somewhat overshadowed by a separate rant dredging up a racist conspiracy about Haitian migrants in Ohio. But the former president’s admission that the GOP still has no central answer for what it would replace Obamacare with has been seized upon by his enemies.
Harris herself has taken to making light of the remark. In a sitdown with Oprah Winfrey, the vice president said that the current $5,000 tax credit for starting a small business was inadequate — and joked that it would only fund “the concept of a business”.
Whether Trump and the GOP would actually push to repeal Obamacare — rather than just carve out the regulations and agencies related to it through political appointments — is another story. The ex-president and his party never launched a second bid to replace the legislation after the party’s 2017 failure, instead pivoting to a tax plan which passed later that year. It was the last time Trump had majorities in both chambers of Congress, and had the opportunity to try.
Trump indicated otherwise during his debate with Harris earlier this month. While largely misrepresenting how he and his party signed on to the legislation aimed at killing the Affordable Care Act, the ex-president insisted that he “saved” the signature legislation of his predecessor. JD Vance, his running mate, has made similar remarks.
“Obamacare was lousy healthcare. Always was,” said Trump at the debate. “I had a choice to make when I was president: Do I save it and make it as good as it can be? Never going to be great. Or do I let it rot? And I felt I had an obligation, even though politically it would have been good to just let it rot and let it go away... And I saved it. I did the right thing.”
And a Trump campaign spokesperson claimed that the former president had fully moved on from his effort to repeal the legislation.
"Kamala Harris is lying because she is losing. President Trump has repeatedly said he is not going to terminate the Affordable Care Act. He is going to make healthcare actually affordable, in addition to bringing down inflation, cutting taxes, and reducing regulations to put more money back in the pockets of all Americans who have been robbed by Kamala Harris and Joe Biden's disastrous economic policies,” said Karoline Leavitt.
