Really, it’s been a eugenics policy since the fall of the Berlin Wall
The ‘Big Beautiful Bill’ just makes it more blatant
According to the Washington Post, “[Senate Republicans] received a reminder of the perils [of cutting Medicaid funding] Friday at an Iowa town hall, when Sen. Joni Ernst (R-Iowa) flippantly responded to an audience member who shouted out that people who lose coverage under the [Big Beautiful Bill] would die.
“Well, we all are going to die,” Ernst said as the crowd groaned. ‘For heaven’s sakes, folks.’ . . .
“The Republican legislation, which narrowly passed the House last month, seeks to pay for some of [Donald] Trump’s priorities by cutting more than $1 trillion from spending on social safety net programs over the next decade. The changes could lead to 8.7 million people losing Medicaid coverage and 7.6 million more uninsured people over 10 years, according to projections from the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office.”[1]
I don’t see how, reasonably, one can challenge that audience member’s assertion, implicitly that taking Medicaid coverage away from people will lead to worse health outcomes, explicitly including some deaths. It looks to me like further evidence of what I have identified previously as a eugenics policy, in which people who can afford children are considered worthy of reproducing,[2] now in which people who can afford health care are considered worthy of receiving it.
As I observed then, the assumption seems to be that economic success marks human beings as ‘worthy.’[3] Even as Trump seems to eviscerate neoliberal ‘free’ (always ask for whom, to do what, to whom, at whose expense) trade policies with his ‘beautiful’ tariffs, the neoliberal reduction of all ‘value’ to quantitative value, especially monetary value, here remains intact.
This exposes that neoliberalism, embraced by both major parties since the fall of the Berlin Wall, when U.S. politicians interpreted the fall of the Soviet Union as a vindication of the U.S. political and economic system,[4] has been a eugenics policy all along: The proposed Medicaid cuts follow a long series of social safety net program cuts and an ongoing refusal to raise the minimum wage in which an inescapable message is not that the talents of the poor have been squandered and discarded, but rather that the poor should be left to die off.
It is just now that Republicans are making this bipartisan policy blatant.
[1] Patrick Svitek, “Ernst’s ‘we all are going to die’ quip underscores GOP’s Medicaid challenge,” Washington Post, June 3, 2025, https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2025/06/03/ernst-medicaid-cuts-republican-message/
[2] David Benfell, “Eugenics again,” Not Housebroken, April 29, 2025, https://www.disunitedstates.org/p/eugenics-again
[3] David Benfell, “Eugenics again,” Not Housebroken, April 29, 2025, https://www.disunitedstates.org/p/eugenics-again
[4] Melvyn P. Leffler, “The Free Market Did Not Bring Down the Berlin Wall,” Foreign Policy, November 7, 2014, http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2014/11/07/berlin_wall_fall_25_anniversary_reagan_bush_germany_merkel_cold_war_free_market_capitalism