To the editor,
Some years ago, as part of my job as a Social Worker I was present at a large gathering of elders convened to question some proposed changes and possible reductions in Medicare and Medicaid. An attorney was there to help people negotiate the minefield of complexity that these provisions entailed. At one point, a frustrated and irate woman asked, “What do they expect us elders to do – die?” Without a trace of humor, which might have been welcome, the attorney said, “Madam, I think you should seriously consider that the answer to that question is very definitely in the affirmative.”
Recently, Republican Sen. Ernst, when faced with a similar allegation that the current Medicaid cuts will result in the death of some people, answered, and without a trace of human feeling, “Well, we’re all going to die.” Is it perhaps time that we, like the harried woman above, seriously consider that a significant, if not compelling motive of these and all the cuts to health programs such as defunding N.I.H. and medical research in universities is indeed and exactly that; that the most vulnerable who tend to be the most burdensome, should in fact die! Perhaps Sen. Ernst thinks that in the present climate this can now be openly asserted.
In what was supposed to be a subsequent apology, she made it worse; She apologized only for erroneously thinking that all her auditors knew they were going to die, and compounded her new insult with a sarcastic reference to the tooth fairy! That way she not only retained her calloused insensitivity intact but overtly stuffed it down the throats of her critics in a triumph of egotistic domination. In her apology she really said , “ I well know that some will die sooner than others precisely because of this bill; I couldn’t care less, and you can’t do a damn thing about it.”
Supporters of the cuts will contend that these deaths are but regrettable collateral damage; that the purpose of the reductions is to achieve economic stability. But most ironically, this very same legislation is blatantly designed, through generous tax cuts, to improve the financial condition of those whose economic stability is more than sound! Also, collateral damage is still volitional damage.
Coiled in all deliberate and cruel deprivation is the potential, the prerogative, and the approval of death; deprivation is its cognate and partial manifestation. To intend the deprivation is, ultimately and morally, to intend the death, because it is the final means of effecting the deprivation.
Joseph R. Noone
Lynn, MA
