Will We Die Early?

During a recent town hall meeting, Iowa Senator Joni Ernst let slip the radical right’s thinking toward this country’s social safety net. Congressional Republicans want to decimate spending on the poor and elderly by supporting Trump’s mega-spending bill that gives tax breaks to billionaires and balloons the national debt while robbing millions of health care and children of the help they need.

Voters warned Ernst that people will die if Medicaid and Medicare are slashed. An unconcerned Ernst quipped, “Well, we all are going to die.” No apologies for a possible slip of the tongue. Just a fatalistic shrug to the inevitable.

Ernst’s coldhearted thinking reveals an insidious strategy by Republican lawmakers to avoid responsibility to serve all of us. If death is inevitable, then no policy or vote can be blamed for killing us, because “stuff happens.” It is a brutal attempt by Republicans to justify what they know is morally wrong. This lethal combination of fiscal austerity and detachment means socialism for the rich and corporations and late-stage capitalism for everybody else.

Those who think like Ernst attempt to avoid any obligation to relieve preventable suffering and early deaths. It’s callous disregard for people who have lost jobs and opportunities from globalization, workplace automation, and 40 years of anti-government rhetoric. Since the 1980s, the economic playing field has been severely tilted in favor of those who already benefit from technological advances, government deregulation, and tax breaks.

If the planned health cuts happen, prescriptions will go unfilled, people will skip doctor appointments, and early treatment for cancer, heart disease, and diabetes will not occur. We all will bear the increased cost of health care and insurance when people use the emergency room (if they can find one in rural areas) instead of early prevention measures. As blogger Aaron Parnas points out, Ernst’s way of thinking is the difference between dying with dignity at 89 or at 39 from treatable illness.

We’re asking lawmakers from dog catcher up to the U.S. President not to help us avoid death but to help us avoid unneeded death and suffering and the misery that it creates.

Ernst will continue her version of French queen Marie Antoinette’s quote prior to the French Revolution. The queen said, “Let them eat cake,” when confronted with the plight of starving peasants who had no bread. I can only hope we all will keep our heads through this crisis and not die early.

Duane Kanagy

Gettysburg