Medicare and Medicaid

A Very Bad Year for Women’s Health

PUBLISHED 12/24/2025 by

When I started writing for The Contrarian, a funny-not-funny inside joke was whether there would be enough fodder for a weekly democracy column that overtly centers gender. I think you already know the punchline. Suffice it to say, I did not miss a single Wednesday in all of 2025.

For my final entry of the year, we thought it worthwhile to offer a snapshot—a year’s worth of reporting on the depth of damage this administration has wreaked on women’s health, with real-time Contrarian reporting noted.

Congress Went on Recess. Americans Got Higher Healthcare Bills.

PUBLISHED 12/22/2025 by

Congressional discussions on extending the Affordable Care Act (ACA) tax credits, which are set to expire Dec. 31, remain deadlocked as Congress begins its winter recess. Now, millions will see their premiums increase as a result: Payments will more than double on average—some even quadrupling—for enrollees who were eligible for the tax credits.

Without the extension, more and more ACA marketplace enrollees will drop their increasingly costly health insurance plans. This comes at a time when the ACA is more popular than ever—recent polls show that across the political spectrum, three quarters of voters support extending the tax credits.

Could the administration’s latest attack on transgender young people be the administration’s way of deflecting attention from the disaster unfolding in real time for millions of families in need of healthcare?  

Project 2026 Declares Open War on Women’s Rights

PUBLISHED 12/13/2025 by

When The Heritage Foundation released its new policy blueprint for 2026 this week—an extension of the now-infamous Project 2025—it did so with the calm confidence of an institution convinced no one will stop it. The document is shorter than last year’s 900-page “Mandate for Leadership,” but no less dangerous. It is, in fact, more candid.

Project 2026 lays out a government redesigned to control women’s bodies, erase LGBTQ+ lives, dismantle civil rights protections and roll back decades of hard-won progress. Wrapped in the language of “family,” “sovereignty” and “restoring America,” it is a direct attempt to impose a narrow, rigid ideology on an entire nation.

Make no mistake: This is a plan for forced motherhood, government-policed gender and the end of women’s equality as we know it.

But Project 2026 is not destiny. It is a warning—and one we must answer with the full force of a movement that has never accepted a future written for us by someone else.

A Century After the Eugenics Movement, the U.S. Is Again Barring Disabled Immigrants

PUBLISHED 11/20/2025 by

This month, Secretary of State Marco Rubio instructed visa officers to consider obesity and other chronic health conditions, such as heart disease, cancer and diabetes, as justification to deny people visas to the United States.

Many were outraged and shocked, observing the Trump administration’s new expansion of the “public charge” rule—directing visa officers to deny entry to people with disabilities, chronic illnesses or age-related conditions—as a modern revival of eugenic immigration policy designed to exclude, control and institutionalize disabled and marginalized people.

When Trump first took office in 2016, the Trump administration broadened the definition of public charge to include people who receive SNAP benefits, medicaid, housing assistance, childcare subsidies and more. This new rule was published in 2019 and went into effect in 2020 and early 2021; President Biden ended the use of this public charge rule definition in March 2021, returning it to the older but still restrictive version. Following Trump’s new rule, visa denials based on the “public charge” rule exploded during Trump’s first residency, rising from just over 1,000 denials in 2016 to over 20,000 in 2019, and it had disastrous effects.

As the Migration Policy Institute (MPI) found, broadening this public charge rule led many people to reduce or stop using benefits or services for themselves.

Ahead of the Country: How Florida’s Progressive Fight Against Authoritarianism Is Setting the Tone

PUBLISHED 10/31/2025 by

Like many others across the nation, people gathered outside the Duval County Courthouse in Jacksonville, Fla., on Oct. 18, 2025, to send a message: No Kings. People played music and danced. Kids found space to throw a football. People ran into old friends. 

“What really stood out to me was how much fun it was. I mean, people were enjoying themselves. You had people in frog costumes and other things. You had some pretty funny signs,” says Larry Hannan, communications and policy director for State Voices Florida, who attended the No Kings rally in Jacksonville. 

While Florida has trended red in the last decade, its voters have consistently favored progressive measures. In 2024, Florida’s Right to Abortion Initiative, as well as the state’s Marijuana Legalization Initiative, received 57 and 56 percent of the vote, respectively. Even though both measures were supported by the majority of voters, both initiatives were struck down because they failed to meet Florida’s 60 percent supermajority.

“In a lot of ways, the better we fight back here, the better the country is. Because a lot of people are saying, ‘Oh, I can’t believe this is happening.’ And us in Florida are saying, ‘Yeah, this happened a few years ago,’” says Hannan, who noted that Florida has served as a rough draft for the conservative MAGA movement, since many of the president’s current advisers are former Florida officials. 

How We Can Turn Away From Medicalized Birth Culture and Reset the U.S. Birth Care System

PUBLISHED 10/24/2025 by

The U.S. has been doing birth backwards for decades, providing highly medicalized, costly care despite poor outcomes, and ignoring data that estimates at least 60 percent of U.S. pregnancies are low-risk and could be safely supported by midwives in a community setting.

Alice Walker writes, “The most common way people give up their power is by thinking they don’t have any.” It is this self-defeating pattern in the face of authoritarianism that the current U.S. federal government is counting on. And sadly, a pattern to which some of our most powerful institutions have succumbed. Fear and chaos are tried and true tools of oppression. Vision and courage, however, are exponentially stronger.

America’s birth care system can be reset, but not by fearfully resisting its collapse or playing in its rubble.

(This essay is part of a collection presented by Ms. and the Groundswell Fund highlighting the work of Groundswell partners advancing inclusive democracy.)

America Is an Increasingly Dangerous Place for Women and Girls 

PUBLISHED 10/17/2025 by

In America’s hyper-macho, gun-drenched culture, growing up female has never been safe. But under the Trump administration, America is becoming a much more dangerous place for women and girls.

America is dangerous for women and girls because our leaders choose to make it so. The Trump administration has already begun blocking access to abortion and Medicaid coverage for reproductive health, as well as targeting the rights of pregnant people within the 2023 Pregnant Workers Fairness Act.

Already, the macho culture of the U.S. has steadily made women’s safety in the nation decline. Around 41 percent of women in the U.S. have experienced sexual violence, while a third of women reported severe assault by a husband or boyfriend. The normalization of gun violence and violent pornography have also run rampant across the country, making America more dangerous day by day.

Who Gets to Procreate and Parent? A Black Feminist Critique of the Pronatalist Agenda

PUBLISHED 10/17/2025 by , and

Pronatalism is not simply about encouraging births—it is a political project rooted in racism and control. Its goal is to engineer a future that permits only certain people to bear and raise children while coercing or punishing others for reproducing or parenting.

Adriana Smith’s experience of coerced reproduction is a devastating example: a Black nurse and mother declared brain-dead, yet kept on life support for months to sustain her pregnancy under Georgia’s restrictive abortion laws. This is what pronatalism looks like in practice—the state asserting ownership over a Black woman’s body.

As Black feminists, we understand that reproductive choices are personal, but they are also deeply shaped by structural power. Pronatalist leaders and influencers cloak their agenda in the language of family and morality, but in truth, they seek to restrict autonomy and consolidate control. Reproductive justice, by contrast, insists on every person’s right to decide whether and how to have children, and to parent in safety and dignity.

This Manufactured Shutdown Threatens Healthcare and Reproductive Freedom

PUBLISHED 10/9/2025 by

This is not governing—it’s sabotage, carried out at the expense of Americans’ health and freedoms.

In July, House Republicans created a healthcare crisis when they rammed through a budget that gutted Medicaid, defunded Planned Parenthood and put a target on the Affordable Care Act. Now, instead of fixing the mess they made, they’re steering us toward a government shutdown that will only compound the damage.

Americans across the political spectrum value these programs. Medicaid, Planned Parenthood and the ACA are lifelines in red states and blue states alike. People may disagree on politics, but they overwhelmingly agree that their families deserve access to affordable healthcare. That’s why the position to protect care and keep the government open is both the responsible path forward and the popular one.

One Megabill for the Megarich

PUBLISHED 10/7/2025 by

The Trump administration is calling its new budget “the most pro-family legislation ever crafted.” But for women like Bre’Jaynae Joiner, a single mother of two in Oakland, the cuts to Medicaid and SNAP threaten her family’s very survival.

Over the next decade, more than 11 million Americans—mostly women and children—are expected to lose health coverage, while deep food assistance cuts and work requirements will push even more families into crisis. Advocates call the bill a massive transfer of wealth to the rich at the expense of the poor, a policy that will shutter rural hospitals, deny essential care and worsen maternal mortality.

As Sen. Raphael Warnock puts it plainly: “If you cut $900 billion out of Medicaid, people are going to die.”