Trump on health care: Cancer cures, faster access to medicines

WASHINGTON — In a far-ranging, free-wheeling 90-minute acceptance speech for the Republican nomination to the presidency, former President Trump hit the populist highlights: Americans will have faster access to new medicines, real answers for cancer and Alzhiemer’s disease, and better Medicare in his second term, he claimed.

But aside from a passing comment about womens’ sports, Trump stayed away from a growing effort by GOP lawmakers to limit transgender peoples’ rights and bar gender-affirming care. He also did not mention abortion, reflecting his campaign’s effort to distance Trump from increasingly unpopular bans that have alienated voters in key states.

Limiting abortion access and transgender health care are two key policy priorities that made it into a relatively sparse 16-page platform from the Republican National Committee this month. While the party is effectively shifting away from a hard-line push for a federal abortion ban it has leaned into making transgender people, roughly one percent of the U.S. population, central to GOP voters’ ire.

The shift happened as Trump and other Republicans saw broad voter opposition to interference in reproductive care, LGBTQ advocates say. As Trump, his VP pick JD Vance, and other party members softened their stance on abortion policy, they ratcheted up attacks on another avenue of health care, promising federal prohibitions on gender-affirming surgeries and treatments.

“They started to throw spaghetti at the wall to try to figure out where they could go next. And, unfortunately, what stuck was transgender youth,” said Lanae Erickson, senior VP for social policy, education and politics at Third Way, a center-left think tank.

Gender-affirming care for minors has ignited the conservative base and unleashed hundreds of bills in primarily red states seeking to bar it entirely, limit youth sports participation, and prohibit taxpayer funding for any procedure or care.

Yet nationally, polls suggest that moderate and independent support for gender-affirming care has actually grown in the past years. Fifty-six percent of independent voters opposed criminalizing gender-affirming care for minors in a March 2023 NPR/PBS/Marist poll, compared to 45% who opposed bans in an NPR/Ipsos poll the previous June. Republican opposition to minors’ gender-affirming care grew during that time, while Democrats’ support remained steady at just under 70%.

The polling runs parallel to voters’ answers on abortion policy: Sixty-three percent of Americans believe abortion should be legal in “all or most cases,” according to May 2024 polling from Pew Research Center.

Transgender peoples’ rights represent yet another thorny area of health care freedom for Republicans to step into, as voters respond to state bans. Most Ohioans, for instance, dislike candidates who champion gender-affirming-care restrictions. A federal court in the state this week heard challenges to a law that would bar gender-affirming surgery and medication such as hormone therapy.

The Supreme Court recently agreed to hear a case on Tennessee’s ban on gender-affirming care for minors, promising arguments as early as this…