Sen. Joni Ernst Said the Quiet Part Out Loud
/By Crystal Lindell
Last week Sen. Joni Ernst (R) of Iowa said the quiet part out loud at a town hall meeting.
While responding to a comment about President Trump’s planned Medicaid cuts possibly killing people, Ernst shrugged and said, “Well, we all are going to die.”
Her remark drew a chorus of boos, as you’ll see in the video:
Ernst may have been talking about Medicaid, but the implication was that everyone was going to die eventually. Of course, the key word here is “eventually.”
There’s a big difference between dying at 21 and dying at 97. Just because someone is going to die eventually, that doesn’t mean that it’s OK for them to die today. In fact, that’s why when someone cuts another person’s life short via murder, we usually punish them for doing so.
I’m sure Ernst can understand this concept when it comes to herself. After all, I doubt she’d be OK with being denied urgent medical care herself, and then being met with a shrug and a dismissive, “Well she was going to die anyway.”
The thing is, Ernst wasn’t thinking of herself when she made the comment. Rather, she was thinking of the general public, the masses if you will.
She was thinking of you and me.
And to Ernst, our lives are disposable. We are just the peasants who are going to die eventually, so we might as well die today as far as she’s concerned.
Just in case you thought that perhaps Ernst misspoke or was taken out of context, she doubled down a day later with a weird selfie video filmed in a cemetery, of all places.
“I made an incorrect assumption that everyone in the auditorium understood that yes, we are all going to perish from this Earth. So I apologize,” she said in the video, before glibly adding, “And I'm really, really glad that I did not have to bring up the subject of the tooth fairy as well."
You can see her full “apology” here:
Our lives are truly just a joke to Sen. Ernst.
The thing is, as a chronically ill patient with a bachelor’s degree in political science, I can report that Ernst’s blase attitude about our deaths is all too common. Both our political leaders and many of our healthcare professionals view the (lack of) value of our lives the same way she does.
You saw it in the government’s poor response to the COVID pandemic, when they did things like prioritizing the economy over people’s lives.
You also see it Trump’s “One Big Beautiful Bill,” which would take healthcare benefits away from 10 million people and cut $700 billion from Medicaid
And you see it in the way that chronic pain patients are treated by doctors and government policies.
Many doctors will do anything to avoid the personal stress and intense scrutiny from law enforcement and state medical boards for prescribing opioids. And some don’t care if it means that patients suffer or even die as a result. Doctors know that untreated pain can be dangerous, especially if it pushes patients to the black market looking for relief.
They share the same attitude that Ernst expressed: “We all are going to die.”
Most doctors would do anything possible to extend their own lives. They would also do anything possible to extend the quality of their lives, even if that means taking the same opioids they might deny pain patients.
The root of these issues is that a lot of people with power – whether its political power or power in the exam room – see themselves as belonging to a superior class of humans. And anytime a human feels like they are superior to another human, they can start to justify some really awful things.
Ernst saying, “We all are going to die” is the natural end point of that thought process.
But she wasn’t talking about herself.
What Ernst really meant was much darker: “You are all going to die – and I don’t care.”
