It's not a hyperbolic concern. Internationally, people are in fact dying as a result of the decimation of USAID funding. With funding red-lined for AIDS prevention in Africa, the numbers of infants being born HIV-positive is frighteningly on the rise. And now we are cutting funding at home. "People are going to die," the audience member asserted.
After an initial stammer, Senator Ernst flippantly responded, "We are all going to die."
As a point of fact, the Senator is irrefutably correct. Funding or not funding Medicaid will not change that. As a species we are universally mortal. For the religiously minded, that is Bible 101. As God told Adam in Genesis 3, "From dust you came, and to dust you shall return." It is a summary acknowledgement echoed by the wry writer of Ecclesiastes in the third chapter of that Sage's book: "All go to the same place; all come from dust, and to dust all return."
So yes, we are all going to die, though I suspect the impassioned audience member didn't need Senator Ernst's reminder. It's not exactly news.
But it is curious and callous logic with which to defend cuts to a budget that provides medical care to those unable to afford it themselves. As part of the social "safety net" that Americans once insisted we collectively keep mended and secure, Medicaid is fairly understood to be life saving. Is it perfect? Of course not. Is there waste and fraud? Almost certainly. It is a system of people, for people. Intrinsically it will be as flawed as the people supervising it and benefiting from it. A key cultural question is where we choose to err. Will we help all we can, accepting that some are scamming the system, or will we tighten the strings, accepting that some who qualify will be denied and die?
Senator Ernst has made her answer pretty clear. "We are all going to die." Our own modern day Marie Antoinette quipping her equivalent of, "Let them eat cake."
Accepting her logic, however, one begins to wonder where her course of "thinking" extends. My doctor friends will surely be displeased because, continuing with her train of thought, we really have no need of them. Hospitals? Extraneous and certainly costly. Ambulances? What's the point? Helmets for cyclists? So what if the rider crashes? We are all going to die. The pharmaceutical industry suddenly sounds completely superfluous. What, after all, is the value of one more day?
Perhaps the ancient Epicureans in culture and scripture were right: "Eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow we die."
With a full stomach and a woozy mind, perhaps we won't care.
Maybe that's what the government should fund instead of health care. Food and booze. It's bound to be cheaper.
And that seems to be all that matters.