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“Well We Are All Going to Die”

A senior Senator from Iowa, Joni Ernst, got accidentally candid about a bill that will take vital healthcare and food assistance away from millions of Americans. The cuts are designed to pay for (a fraction) of the biggest tax cuts for the wealthy elites in modern history.

When a constituent correctly pointed out that the Republican reconciliation bill that slashes healthcare for millions would cost people their lives, Senator Ernst smirked and glibly responded: “Well we are all going to die.” Senator Ernst’s words have gone viral and dozens of outlets have covered the story as we were writing this email.

And her words should be treated as a political earthquake. This administration and its allies in Congress have taken great pains to contort the truth and sell themselves as leaders of a populist, working-class coalition. In one fell swoop, the Vice Chair of the Senate Republican Conference let slip the truth. They don’t care about you.

Trump and congressional leaders do not care about ordinary Americans
  • They are gutting healthcare for American families, taking food out of poor kids’ mouths, to then give away the biggest tax windfall in modern history to their megarich friends and donors.
  • Despite promise after promise that they would not strip millions of their healthcare by gutting Medicaid, Trump and his allies are just a few votes from doing exactly that.
  • Make no mistake, this bill will kick about 10 million Americans, including children, off of Medicaid. It will also kick 8 million off of their Affordable Care Act coverage and raise premiums for millions more.
  • When the people behind this continue to lie and say this won’t happen, don’t listen, because we know they tried to do it before. They came one vote short of kicking 30 million people off of their healthcare the last time they put America through this nonsense.
  • We know that when people lose insurance coverage, they are more likely to die earlier than those without coverage.
  • And now, thanks to Senator Ernst, we know that Trump and his congressional allies simply don’t care.
The bill is going to have other horrific consequences, like slashing benefits for nursing home, hospice, and assisted living care for seniors
  • It will take food assistance away from millions, including free lunches from hundreds of thousands of kids.
  • It would also make our communities less safe. Study after study has shown that when people gain access to coverage through Medicaid, crime drops, and when that coverage is lost, crime goes up.
  • All of this is to pay for massive tax giveaways to their wealthy donors like Elon Musk. But as brutal as these cuts are, they hardly dent the price tag of that tax handout.
This bill is the most brazen example yet of an Administration that is bought and paid for by the wealthy elites
  • The bill is the biggest tax giveaway to the rich and powerful, like Elon Musk, who spent $300 million to get Trump in the White House, that we have seen in the modern era.
  • Just like they insisted the bill wouldn’t cut Medicaid, they are also trying to convince the public that spending trillions of dollars on tax cuts for their rich friends won’t add to the deficit.
  • It’s a bold-faced lie. The true cost of the tax scheme is actually $6.5 trillion dollars.
  • If they lie about whether or not they have just voted to kick millions off of their healthcare, if they lie about whether or not they just spent $6.5 trillion dollars of your money, what won’t they lie about?
The bottom line is that it should come as no surprise that they will take away your healthcare to pay for new yachts and sports cars and beach houses for their billionaire campaign donors
  • This is the same Administration that, in the last month:
    • pardoned a rich tax cheat after his mom wrote a $1 million check to Trump
    • launched a thinly-veiled bribery scheme where wealthy donors, including those not based in the US, directly line Trump’s pockets by pouring hundreds of millions into Trump’s “memecoin” business in an attempt to gain influence
    • accepted a $400 million plane from the Qatari government

While we all know what Senator Ernst really meant–she doesn’t care about ordinary Americans dying–she’s technically right. We are all going to die one day. We owe it to our country to spend our time on Earth standing up against gutting the healthcare of tens of millions of people and ripping food out of the mouths of millions of children all to cover for a $6.5 trillion tax scam for the wealthy elites.

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