Opinion: Project 2025 would be a death sentence for patients like me

Milwaukee resident Kat Klawes shares how Project 2025 would severely impact healthcare access.

My entire life has depended on access to healthcare. Growing up in rural Wisconsin, finding affordable and quality healthcare was difficult, and when it was found it was expensive. When I was 12, I accidentally cut my hand open and I was crying not out of pain but because I knew it would cost a lot of money. I knew how the necessary care would impact my family financially.

I was born with multiple health conditions, otherwise known as “pre-existing conditions” by insurance companies. Without the Affordable Care Act (ACA), I’d be bankrupt. The ACA allowed me to stay on my parents’ insurance and become the first in my family to graduate from college, giving me a pathway out of the economic conditions I was born into.

I was diagnosed with cancer on my 26th birthday and because of the ACA, I was able to enroll in a marketplace healthcare plan that day. The ACA has saved my life and Donald Trump’s threats to repeal the ACA, as well as the possibility of Project 2025 being enacted, would be a death sentence for patients like me.

Project 2025 would lessen patient safety, patient rights when seeking healthcare, cause massive price gouging on life-saving medication, and undo all of the historic work of the Biden-Harris administration.

Project 2025 would end Medicare drug price negotiation, a monumental policy made by the Biden-Harris administration. This policy would fully prioritize pharmaceutical companies over everyday Americans, making prescriptions I have to take to live even more expensive and inaccessible.

Project 2025 would also remove consumer protections from non-subsidized ACA marketplace plans, meaning people with preexisting conditions like me would be forced to pay unregulated premiums for healthcare. Between paying more for prescriptions and health insurance plans, Project 2025 would harm people with disabilities and threaten both our health and economic security. These policies put my future, and countless others’, at stake.

The constant threats to healthcare made by Republicans have made it impossible for me to plan for my future. I love doing policy and nonprofit work in my home state of Wisconsin, but I can’t get too comfortable in my career in case I need to move or change careers should the ACA be repealed.

My cervical cancer was caught because of a pap smear that was covered as part of preventative screenings. I would shudder to think about what would have happened without access to preventative screenings. These are real fears on the minds of millions of Americans every day who rely on the ACA and Medicare for coverage.

We are not a small fraction or a minority of people. Our needs matter and our voices will be heard. We refuse to go back to a health insurance system that doesn’t serve us; we cannot let Project 2025 be enacted and reverse the progress that has been made.

Related: 2024 Guide to Voiting in Wisconsin