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Column: Healthcare — and not just reproductive care — was on the ballot, and it lost big
It was perhaps natural that campaign coverage of the presidential candidates’ healthcare policies began and ended with abortion rights; since June 2022, when the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, 20 states have banned abortions or enacted draconian restrictions on the procedure.
That landscape could turn even more dire with the reelection of Donald Trump. But many other healthcare issues were implicitly on the ballot Tuesday. Republicans may well feel empowered to continue their long campaign against the nation’s public health infrastructure, to step up their attacks on science, and to spread the anti-vaccine mantra of Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who has worked his way into Trump’s inner circle.
The Biden administration’s progress in making healthcare more accessible and affordable for all Americans, especially seniors on Medicare, is almost certain to be rolled back. RFK Jr. and other healthcare quacks, such as Florida Surgeon General Joseph Ladapo, may move into national policy-making. Religion-based policies may move to the fore, shouldering science-based policies aside. The plundering of healthcare institutions by private equity investors could pick up steam.
I will not give one penny to any school that has a vaccine mandate or a mask mandate.
— Donald Trump, threatening millions of children with measles, polio, COVID and other vaccine-preventable diseases
If any of these eventualities come to pass, America’s health profile will be in danger of declining, and sharply. The main victims would be women, seniors and low-income households.
Let’s examine the particulars. Some of these derive from the Heritage Foundation’s notorious Project 2025, a road map to a reactionary future that is sure to animate many Trump administration policies. But others reflect policy efforts already tried in red states or promoted during Trump’s first term.
ABORTION: Protections for abortion rights were on the ballot in 10 states, and passed in seven — not including Florida, where a measure rolling back the state’s draconian abortion ban garnered 57% of the vote but fell short of the 60% required to pass. (That threshold was enacted in 2006 after it was placed on the ballot by a Republican-controlled legislature; as it happens, the 60% rule passed even though it did not itself garner 60% of the vote.)
In only two other states is a supermajority required to pass a ballot measure: Colorado (55% required) and New Hampshire (two-thirds, or 66.7%).
The seven states in which voters protected abortion rights by enshrining them in the state constitution were Arizona, Colorado, Maryland, Missouri, Montana, New York and Nevada. Measures failed in South Dakota and Nebraska.
Republican and conservative hostility to abortion rights has persisted despite the ghastly deaths of pregnant women because doctors were unwilling to terminate their pregnancies because the treatment would break the law in their states, even in an emergency, and expose the doctors to consequences including criminal prosecution.
Trump has specifically said he would not support a national abortion ban “under any circumstances,” but that leaves open a multitude of ways he could achieve that goal by another name, whether by applying an ancient federal law to constrain the shipment of abortion pills, installing reproductive rights opponents at federal healthcare agencies as he did in his first term, or some other means. Plainly, abortion rights aren’t safe in a Trump presidency.
GENDER: Trump made gender-related medical treatments a target of his campaign, spinning a deranged fantasy about schools subjecting children to gender-changing surgery behind their parents’ backs; Project 2025 disdains what it calls “the new woke gender ideology, which has as a principal tenet ‘gender affirming care’ and ‘sex-change’ surgeries on minors.”
This parallels laws passed in several red states barring any gender-affirming care for minors. In fact, surgery is not part of the standard of care in gender-affirming cases involving children and adolescents. The authors of Project 2025 advocate barring transgender individuals from serving in the military.
AFFORDABLE CARE ACT: The repeal of Obamacare, as it’s familiarly known, has been a prime goal of Republicans since the law’s enactment in 2010. The law was saved from repeal in 2017, during the last Trump administration, by a single “no” vote from the late Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.).
It’s still a target. House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) vowed last month that there would be “No Obamacare” in another Trump term. The law is popular, however, favored by 62% of Americans according to a KFF opinion poll in May. Trump has repeatedly promised to offer an alternative program, but never has done so.
Project 2025 calls for giving more latitude to bare-bones health plans such as association health plans and short-term health plans. These don’t meet ACA standards because they often exclude essential healthcare services and can mislead consumers into thinking an illness or treatment is covered — learning the truth only when they try to obtain coverage.
The road map also calls for curtailing the ACA’s contraceptive mandate, which it says “has been the source of years of egregious attacks on many Americans’ religious and moral beliefs.” (Of course, the ACA doesn’t require that anyone actually use a contraceptive, only that they be covered without cost-sharing.)
It calls for removing the “morning-after pill” Ella from the contraceptive mandate. It also calls for turning the clock back on the Food and Drug Administration’s safety approval for the abortion pill mifepristone, which is currently the target of a lawsuit file by antiabortion activists.
MEDICAID and MEDICARE: These crucial federal healthcare programs — the first serving low-income Americans and the second serving seniors — are in the GOP’s gunsights. Project 2025 claims that they are “the principal drivers of our $31-trillion national debt. … In essence, our deficit problem is a Medicare and Medicaid problem.”
Never mind that the single biggest driver of federal deficits is the tax cut for corporations and the wealthy signed by Trump in 2017, which could add $5.2 trillion to deficits over the next 10 years.
By Project 2025’s reckoning, Medicare and Medicaid together cost $17.8 trillion from 1967 through 2020, a span of 53 years. This year, the two programs enroll more than 140 million Americans, or more than 41% of the population. (Medicare members also pay premiums for some of its parts.)
Although Trump has vowed not to cut Medicare benefits, conservative antagonism toward Medicaid, the state-federal healthcare program for low-income Americans, has never ebbed. In 2014, under former Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wisc.), House Republicans proposed converting the program from one that covered a percentage of state spending on healthcare to enrollees into a block-grant structure, that lacked the flexibility needed to confront disease outbreaks as they occur. Ryan’s plan would have cut Medicaid funding by 26% over a decade.
Vaccines have eradicated smallpox and either eliminated or sharply reduced the incidence of measles, polio, rubella and whooping cough. So why are Trump and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. attacking them?
(Centers for Disease Control and Prevention)
It failed, but the idea was taken up by Trump in his first term, though it wasn’t enacted. Expect it to be considered again. Project 2025 advocates adding work requirements to Medicaid, an idea that has proved in the past to achieve nothing in terms of reducing joblessness or improving enrollees’ health, but did end up throwing thousands of people out of the program.
Permission that the last Trump administration granted some states to impose work requirements for Medicaid was overturned by a federal judge in 2019; the Biden White House consigned the idea to the dumpster.
Project 2025 asserts that the ACA “mandates that states must expand their Medicaid eligibility standards” to include everyone at or below 138% of the federal poverty level. This is a lie. Following a Supreme Court ruling, the ACA leaves it to individual states to cover childless low-income individuals; 10 states, all of which are under the control of GOP governors or legislatures, still haven’t done so. The project also calls for eliminating the 90% government match of the cost of that coverage and reducing it to a “fairer and more rational level,” presumably lower.
VACCINES: The rapid development of COVID-19 vaccines, which averted about 1.1 million U.S. deaths and more than 10.3 million hospitalizations within a year of their introduction in December 2020, was one of the few genuine achievements of the first Trump term. So it’s a mystery why he has turned against them, and against vaccines in general.
During his campaign he promised, “I will not give one penny to any school that has a vaccine mandate or a mask mandate.”
It’s possible that this reflects the sway that Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has exercised over Trump, who has promised to place RFK Jr. in a policymaking role over healthcare. The prospect should make all Americans queasy, for Kennedy is a one-stop shop for conspiracy theories ranging from anti-vaccine claims to outright antisemitism.
The truth is that vaccines are indisputably a triumph of medical science. They’ve eradicated smallpox from the face of the Earth and reduced diseases such as measles, polio and whooping cough to occasional outbreaks (among the unvaccinated). If Trump and RFK Jr. intend to make the world safe again for these diseases, they should come right out and say so.
To the authors of Project 2025, the COVID vaccines along with other anti-pandemic policies were nothing but infringements on individual rights (don’t think about the children and families whose rights to a healthy life would be jeopardized by the elimination of school vaccine mandates).
The project rails against the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the National Institutes of Health — the country’s premier public health agencies — for “the irrational, destructive, un-American mask and vaccine mandates that were imposed upon an ostensibly free people during the COVID-19 pandemic.” It also claims that “masks provide little to no benefit in preventing the spread of viruses and might even be counterproductive,” a statement that is unadulterated BS.
But that’s just one example of how the right wing, which will now occupy a favored perch in the White House, has elevated an amorphous concept of individual freedom over the undeniably real benefits, to millions of people, of robust pubic health imperatives based on communal responsibility.
How much worse will things have to get before the public wakes up to the consequences? Why in heaven’s name would anyone want to find out?
Residents of Monterey Park voted overwhelmingly to ban data centers on election day, making the San Gabriel Valley city the first in the nation to do so by public vote.
As of Wednesday, 86% of votes were in favor of Measure NDC, the city ban, according to the Los Angeles County registrar-recorder/county clerk.
Other cities and towns have passed moratoriums on data centers, as a wave of opposition sweeps the country. But the Monterey Park vote can only be overturned by another ballot measure, making it the most permanent data center ban in a jurisdiction.
Monterey Park’s City Council had already banned data centers by ordinance, after a proposed 247,000-square-foot data center met an outpouring of public anger and concern. The developer withdrew that plan.
That facility would have been less than 500 feet away from the nearest home, and would have used three times the electricity of the entire 60,000-person city. Residents said it would have caused noise and air pollution and driven up electricity rates.
“This ensures long-lasting protections for current and future generations,” Amy Wong, co-founder of the group San Gabriel Valley Progressive Action, said of the vote. “It means that future city councils cannot overturn a data center ban, even if data center developers wanted to spend money to fund pro-data center candidates.”
The measure had no formal opposition. The developer of the proposed facility, investment firm HMC StratCap, said it wouldn’t engage in the ballot fight when it withdrew in March.
The Data Center Coalition, an industry trade group, expressed disappointment in the vote.
“It sends a signal that the area is closed for business, both for data centers and for other significant economic development projects,” state policy director Khara Boender said.
“It deprives local residents of the opportunity to compete for jobs and investment, while also causing the area to relinquish substantial long-term economic investment, high-wage jobs, and critical tax revenue to neighboring areas or other states.”
SGV Progressive Action worked with hyperlocal groups including No Data Center Monterey Park to rally support for the measure.
The group is now focused on stopping data center proposals in the City of Industry and fighting a move by City of Industry, Santa Fe Springs, Vernon and City of Commerce to welcome data centers and other industry with fast-tracked permitting and tax incentives.
City of Industry, in the San Gabriel Valley, and Vernon, south of downtown L.A., are primarily industrial areas, each with around 300 permanent residents. They are employment centers, and tens of thousands of workers commute in daily.
There has been little vocal opposition to data centers among the few residents of these cities. Wong said the protest is primarily coming from the surrounding neighborhoods.
“If a data center gets built in City of Industry, residents across the region would bear the brunt of pollution and increased utility costs,” Wong said, noting that it is surrounded by 16 other cities and unincorporated communities.
Data center proposals have been limited in California compared to Virginia, Texas, Georgia, Illinois and Arizona, which sit at the center of a recent boom in hyperscaler facilities to power artificial intelligence.
California has the third-most data centers in the country, with 300, but high electricity rates, expensive land and regulatory hurdles mean that fewer, and smaller, facilities are currently planned than in other hotspots.
That doesn’t mean opposition hasn’t been fierce. In Coachella and Imperial County, residents are showing up in droves to protest local proposals.
In the San Gabriel Valley, Montebello, El Monte and Baldwin Park have all enacted temporary moratoriums, and Alhambra recently banned data centers as part of a zoning code update.
Wong said she hoped the ballot measure vote would galvanize the opposition. “The vote is a testament to the people power of our region,” she said. “Our region is worth protecting, and we won’t let data centers determine our future.”
A rule intended to prevent rent gouging in the wake of the Eaton and Palisades fires has lapsed in Los Angeles County, possibly exposing some renters to hikes.
The executive order that blocked rent increases was issued by Gov. Gavin Newsom amid the devastating wildfires last year. Under the order, landlords couldn’t increase rents by more than 10% above their prefire levels.
The rule, which was supposed to be temporary and was repeatedly extended, ended Friday after a vote to extend it again failed to garner enough votes. Supervisor Lindsey Horvath, whose district includes Pacific Palisades, sounded the alarm in a motion to extend price protections that failed to pass at the Board of Supervisors’ May 19 meeting.
“These price gouging protections continue to be necessary as construction and rebuilding continue, and as thousands of people remain displaced,” the motion said. “Families which signed short-term leases could face drastic price increases of 50% or more without further price gouging protection.”
Los Angeles County is home to more than 1 million rental properties, though not all of them needed protection from the new rule. There are already stricter rent increase caps for many residences, depending on the location, type and age of the building. Despite the rent control in the region, the people of Los Angeles pay among the highest rents in the country.
It is uncertain whether renters will face rapidly rising rents now that the protection has lapsed. But some real estate experts and policymakers said there was no need for the temporary rule that was part of the governor’s state of emergency.
Supervisors Kathryn Barger, Janice Hahn and Holly Mitchell abstained from voting on the motion to extend the protection, while Supervisors Hilda Solis and Horvath supported it.
“I abstained because I did not see sufficient evidence to justify extending this emergency ordinance, nor did I see evidence to eliminate it entirely,” Hahn said.
Barger’s office said she supported allowing the protections to sunset while waiting to see whether new information emerged.
“Market data already shows countywide rents are only about 2% above pre-emergency levels and rental inventory has grown,” Barger representative Helen E. Chavez Garcia said. “The Supervisor is also mindful of the burden these ongoing protections place on small property owners throughout the county.”
Mitchell did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
There haven’t been steep rent hikes in neighborhoods within three miles of the Palisades fire, according to a Times analysis of data from Zillow, the property listing company.
In ZIP Codes within three miles of the Palisades fire, rent increased 4.8% from December 2024 to April 2025. In areas around the Eaton fire, which destroyed swaths of Altadena, rent jumped 5.2% in the same period.
In L.A. County, ZIP Codes farther from the fires saw only about a 2% increase.
A landlords representative, Jesus Rojas of the Apartment Owners Assn. of Greater Los Angeles, told the supervisors during public comment at the meeting that the county’s rent-gouging rules have “long outlived the emergency they were intended to address” and are now being “wrongfully used to harm thousands of rental housing providers throughout the county.”
“There is no proof that multifamily rental housing providers are hugely increasing rents for impacted homeowners,” Rojas said.
Indeed, there are strong signs that the property market in the Los Angeles area has at last begun to cool.
L.A. metro-area rent prices recently fell to a four-year low, with the median rent slipping to $2,167 in December.
Meanwhile, condominium sales had their slowest start of the year in decades. Condo sales in Los Angeles have plummeted to a 20-year low, with fewer than 2,000 units sold in January and February — the worst start to the year since 2005.
Newsom defended the price-gouging protections shortly after they went into effect.
“In the days following the Los Angeles firestorms, we worked quickly to protect Los Angeles survivors from any form of exploitation,” he said in February 2025. “The state has the tools in place to not only block price gouging during this emergency, but also to prosecute bad actors.”
The Los Angeles County Department of Consumer and Business Affairs said it received more than 2,000 complaints after the fires, alleging that retailers and landlords were taking advantage of people put in hardship by their losses, and sent out more than 2,000 cease-and-desist letters to businesses and landlords for alleged price gouging, said Morine Merritt, who oversees department investigations into consumer and real estate fraud.
“Close to 90% of the complaints that we received involved allegations of rent increases,” Merritt said in an interview. Now that the fire-related protections have expired, existing laws and “regular market conditions determine price increases for goods and services, including rents,” she said.
Crackdowns on fire-related rent gouging have been rare, said Chelsea Kirk of the activist organization the Rent Brigade, which analyzed L.A. County’s rental market in the year after the fires. It reported 18,360 potential examples of price gouging in listings but said that few lawsuits had been filed by authorities so far.
Last week, Rent Brigade announced what it said was the first private civil lawsuit brought by a family that claimed to be rent-gouged in the aftermath of the wildfires. Plaintiffs Randall and Candy Renick, whose Altadena home was damaged, said they were charged nearly three times the maximum permitted rate for nearly 10 months. They seek restitution of $96,000 plus civil penalties and attorneys’ fees.
The rental market has probably stabilized since the fires, Kirk said, but other families may still be “locked into illegal rents” that they agreed to pay when they were in a rush to find housing after they were displaced.
Dear Mr. Pelley:
I meant what I said in my letter last week to the 60 Minutes team: joining 60 Minutes is the honor of my career and I am grateful to be working alongside the people who have contributed to the most important television journalism brand this country has ever produced. While I’m new to 60 Minutes, I’ve devoted my career to investigative journalism and storytelling. I started this job excited to collaborate and to benefit from the wisdom and experience of the 60 Minutes veterans, with you among them. For that reason, one of the first things I did in my new role was call you to talk and invite you to dinner. It is a profound disappointment that you rejected that overture and chose ambush instead. Yesterday, you hijacked my first meeting with staff to disparage me, my qualifications, and my intentions with remarkable incivility and contempt. I welcome a diversity of viewpoints and respectful debate among the team, but this was nothing of the sort. Yesterday’s performative display of hostility enacted in front of the staff instead of in a civil, private conversation-demonstrated that you have no interest in contributing to the future success of the show, or approaching my new tenure with a mind open to collaboration and progress. I am here to deliver first-in-class news programming, not to make headlines about newsroom drama. I am eager to work alongside those who share this goal.
Despite yesterday’s misconduct, I had hoped that in sitting down with you today we could find a path forward together. You made clear that you are not interested in such a path.
Your antipathy to the future of the show has come through loud and clear. And I have heard you. I therefore write on behalf of CBS News, Inc. (“CBS”) to inform you that your employment with CBS is terminated for cause effective immediately. Enclosed is your formal termination letter.
Sincerely,
Nick Bilton
Executive Producer, 60 Minutes
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