GOP Senator’s Defense of Medicaid Cuts: “Well, We All Are Going to Die”
The GOP’s reconciliation bill includes cuts to anti-poverty programs that help save tens of thousands of lives yearly.
A Republican senator has dismissed her constituents’ concerns that the GOP’s sweeping cuts to Medicaid could kill people by saying that “we all are going to die” in a comment on Friday.
As Iowa Republican Sen. Joni Ernst answered a question about the GOP’s cuts in a town hall, constituents concerned over the future of crucial lifesaving programs yelled, “people are going to die.”
“Well, we all are going to die,” Ernst responded, in an exasperated tone. “For heaven’s sakes. For heaven’s sakes, folks.”
“What you don’t want to do is listen to me when I say that we are going to focus on those that are most vulnerable,” she went on.
Numerous studies have found that Republicans’ “one big beautiful bill” will indeed focus on the most vulnerable Americans — by cutting their benefits.
The bill calls for $600 billion in cuts to Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP) through work requirements that research says will inevitably affect the most vulnerable Americans, who lack the resources to navigate red tape and bureaucracy and will therefore lose health care coverage.
Republicans have claimed that their bill will only target people who are not “legitimately” on Medicaid; Ernst characterized the cuts as “corrections” to the program.
“We’re not going to cut those benefits, what we are doing is making sure that those who are not Medicaid eligible are not receiving benefits,” she said.
But work requirements simply don’t work that way, research has continually found, doing nothing to increase employment or address supposed “waste,” instead just taking health care by placing burdensome requirements.
Ernst’s quote demonstrated the GOP’s indifference to the horrific effects its bill will have. Millions of people are projected to lose crucial benefits under Medicaid, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), and more under the bill.
These anti-poverty programs help to save tens of thousands of lives each year, studies have found, by allowing people to access food and medical care that would otherwise be out of reach.
One study published in the New England Journal of Medicine this month, for instance, found that people who lost the benefits under Medicaid’s prescription drug price reduction provisions were between 4 and 22 percent more likely to die during the study’s 17-month period.
Another recent study found that implementing work requirements, under less drastic reductions to Medicaid proposed in previous bills, were associated with at least hundreds of excess deaths per year among people aged 19 to 54.
In other words, there is strong evidence that the Republican reconciliation bill, which has passed the House, will directly cause people to die — an assertion that Ernst seems to believe either isn’t true, or doesn’t matter.
Meanwhile, the Congressional Budget Office has found that one of the key outcomes of the bill will be an enormous redistribution of wealth from the poor to the rich, with 15 million losing health coverage they had under Medicaid or the Affordable Care Act, while the richest Americans would see their wealth increase over the course of the bill’s implementation.