In response to new reporting revealing the harms Donald Trump’s Project 2025 agenda will inflict on rural America, including rural Wisconsinites, DNC Deputy Communications Director Abhi Rahman released the following statement:
“Trump’s full-throated embrace of Project 2025 is devastating news for rural communities across America, including in Wisconsin. The plan will further slash agricultural production, dismantle critical infrastructure, and defund the public schools and hospitals rural communities depend on. While Trump prepares to cut the programs rural families rely on, Democrats are committed to empowering the rural economies and communities in Wisconsin.”
Key Point: “Hospitals and other health providers in rural areas could face the greatest strain from proposals Trump has embraced to slash spending on Medicaid, which provides coverage to a greater share of adults in smaller communities than in large metropolitan areas. And small-town public schools would likely be destabilized even more than urban school districts if Trump succeeds in his pledge to expand ‘school choice’ by providing parents with vouchers to send their kids to private schools.”
The Atlantic: Trump Is About to Betray His Rural Supporters
- In last month’s election, Trump won country communities by even larger margins than he did in his 2020 and 2016 presidential runs. But several core second-term policies that Trump and the Republican Congress have championed could disproportionately harm those places.
- Agricultural producers could face worse losses than any other economic sector from Trump’s plans to impose sweeping tariffs on imports and to undertake what he frequently has called “the largest domestic deportation operation” of undocumented immigrants “in American history.” Hospitals and other health providers in rural areas could face the greatest strain from proposals Trump has embraced to slash spending on Medicaid, which provides coverage to a greater share of adults in smaller communities than in large metropolitan areas. And small-town public schools would likely be destabilized even more than urban school districts if Trump succeeds in his pledge to expand “school choice” by providing parents with vouchers to send their kids to private schools.
- But if Trump acts on the policies he campaigned on, Jacobs added,“it’s hard to imagine that rural [places] will not suffer and will not hurt, and it’s hard to imagine that rural will not respond.” […]
- A recent attempt to model how Trump’s tariff and mass-deportation plans would affect agricultural producers found a devastating combined impact […]
- Equally painful for rural America could be Trump and congressional Republicans’ agenda for health care. Big cuts in federal spending on Medicaid and subsidies for the uninsured to buy coverage under the Affordable Care Act were central to the Trump-backed plan that House Republicans passed in 2017 to repeal the ACA. Trump’s administration later backed a Senate Republican proposal to convert Medicaid into a block grant and significantly cut its funding.
- Rural places would be especially vulnerable to cuts anywhere near the level that Republicans are discussing. Rural residents tend to be older and poorer, and face more chronic health problems. Rural employers are less likely to offer health insurance, which means that Medicaid provides coverage for a larger share of working-age adults in small towns: Multiple studies have found that about a fifth of rural residents rely on Medicaid, compared with less than a sixth in urban areas. Nearly half of all children in rural areas receive health coverage through the federal Children’s Health Insurance Program launched during Bill Clinton’s presidency.
- Medicaid is especially important in confronting two health-care challenges particularly acute in rural communities. One is the opioid epidemic. In a KFF poll last year, more than 40 percent of rural residents said that they or someone in their family had been addicted to opioids, a far higher proportion than in urban or suburban communities.
- Particularly important in that effort has been the ACA’s expansion of Medicaid to cover more working-poor adults who are just above the poverty level. Hundreds of thousands of people are receiving opioid-addiction treatment under Medicaid in heartland states that Trump won, such as Michigan, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Kentucky, and Indiana. In all of those states, a majority of people receiving care are covered through the Medicaid expansion, the center-left Urban Institute has calculated.
- Private insurance, Mann notes, doesn’t provide as much revenue for rural hospitals as it does for urban ones, because fewer rural residents have such coverage to begin with; even for those who do, rural providers lack the economic leverage to demand reimbursement rates that are as high as private insurers provide to urban hospitals. That situation makes Medicaid a crucial lifeline for rural hospitals. “With large cuts to federal health spending, it would be very hard for rural health-care providers to simply survive,” said the KFF’s Levitt. “In many cases, rural hospitals are hanging by a thread already, and it wouldn’t take much to push them over the edge.”
- In the same way that rural hospitals are especially vulnerable to Trump’s health-care agenda, his education plans could threaten another pillar of small-town life: public schools. Trump has repeatedly promised to pursue a nationwide federal voucher system that would provide parents with public funds to send their children to private schools.
- In numerous state ballot initiatives over recent years, rural residents have voted against proposals to create a school-voucher system. That record continued last month when rural areas again mostly voted against voucher systems in ballot initiatives in Nebraska and Kentucky […]
