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Opinion: Despite his silence, Donald Trump’s health care plan is bad medicine for Americans, especially women

By Dr. Amelia Sutton

October 25, 2024

“Donald Trump’s actions and intentions would effectively put politicians in the exam room with doctors and our patients,” Dr. Amelia Sutton, a maternal-fetal medicine physician in Charlotte, writes in an op-ed.

As a physician, I’m concerned about former President Trump’s plan for health care, especially women’s health care. Where the Biden Administration and Vice President Kamala Harris continue to build on the progress of the Affordable Care Act, Trump’s record and the statements he has made on the campaign trail have me and many health care professionals worried.

With just days left of the 2024 election season, Trump remains silent about what exactly he would do to make healthcare more accessible and affordable for North Carolinians. He has failed to provide anything more than “concepts of a plan” for his health care agenda. Doctors are wondering what he will actually do should he get elected. My patients are wondering, too. In fact, two-thirds of Americans really want to know and believe health care issues are being ignored on the campaign trail.

Trump and his running mate JD Vance have come to North Carolina multiple times. Yet they still haven’t provided a clear health care plan.

What little they have said – and done – is troubling.

During his term as president, Trump and Republicans in Congress tried and failed numerous times to repeal the Affordable Care Act (ACA). Trump’s many actions, from slashing outreach efforts to gutting financial support, led to less health care and higher costs

On the campaign trail this year, Trump repeatedly promised to “terminate” the ACA. Trump’s record led to more people without health care, with the uninsured rate increasing from 7.9% percent in 2017 to 8.5% percent in 2018, or by about 2 million people nationwide. More than one million children lost Medicaid coverage between 2017 and 2019. And Trump’s repeal of the individual mandate in the ACA increased health insurance premiums by thousands of dollars.

Trump also bragged that he “was able to kill Roe v. Wade,” opening the door to dangerous abortion bans that we now know are putting people’s health and safety at risk. In fact, the maternal mortality rate has continued to rise in the United States, most dramatically in states with restrictive abortion bans. Trump’s attacks on abortion shouldn’t surprise us: In 2016, Trump said he supports punishing women who have abortions.

Trump and radical Republicans are not stopping at abortion. Trump’s push to eliminate the ACA will make contraception more expensive and less accessible for women, raising costs by hundreds of dollars. 

The blueprint for a second Trump term, Project 2025, envisions ending funding for “Planned Parenthood and all other abortion providers.” With Planned Parenthood serving more than 2 million patients and performing nearly 10 million services, including cancer screenings, STI tests and more in 2023, this attack would endanger the health of countless women.

Trump’s Project 2025 also proposes that states report abortions, threatening states with funding cuts unless they track “how many abortions take place within its borders, at what gestational age of the child, for what reason, the mother’s state of residence, and by what method. It should also ensure that statistics are separated by category: spontaneous miscarriage; treatments that incidentally result in the death of a child (such as chemotherapy); stillbirths; and induced abortion.”

Trump’s attacks on reproductive health care are emboldening other extremists. This month, Missouri, Idaho, and Kansas revived their lawsuit seeking to restrict access to mifepristone, a safe, effective abortion medication that has been on the market for 24 years. Hearing this case is Trump appointee Matthew Kacsmaryk, a federal judge in Texas who oversaw a previous lawsuit to eliminate access to mifepristone, the most common medication abortion regimen available. 

In contrast to the effort to ban health care, the Biden-Harris Administration is striving to protect it, announcing a new rule to require insurance to cover over-the-counter contraception at no cost, just like prescription contraception, which would apply to 52 million people with private health insurance.

Though Trump will not say much about his health care plan, what should be clear is that Trump’s actions and intentions would effectively put politicians in the exam room with doctors and our patients to meddle in private reproductive health decisions.

Women in North Carolina and across the country will not feel safe until they are confident that their health care choices will stay between them and their doctors. Unless Trump and Vance provide real answers and a firm commitment to protecting women’s health care and patients’ privacy, we cannot trust Trump to do what is best for our health.

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