You may have noticed that our news feeds are just filled with all kinds of delightful headlines, some true, some completely false and many falling into the grey area in between. Of course, the Trump Administration’s tactic of “flooding the zone” with things like annexing Greenland and Canada, renaming the Gulf of Mexico and staying on for a third term makes it more difficult to sift through the trash to get to the treasure, but it can be done with some effort.
This week Elon Musk’s ironically named Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE – like the fake currency) has targeted, among many other things, ending Medicaid, a state and federal joint program that provides healthcare for people with little or no income. Providing this kind of charity is not only a mandate of Christian faith (or is this only a Christian nation when megachurches made massive donations?), but it is also a fiscally sound policy. If poor people can afford preventative care they will often choose to get it. If they can’t, they will end up in an emergency room, costing thousands more, and they still don’t pay, so tax payers get stuck with the bill, anyway. Might as well do the Christian, fiscally sound thing, right?
But could ending Medicaid be a good thing?
As hard as it is to separate fact from fiction, it’s even harder to penetrate the MAGA falsosphere with indisputably real news and actual, provable facts. They believe Hillary Clinton was drinking the blood of children in the basement of a DC pizzeria that doesn’t have a basement, for example. More recently, they believe there are dead Civil War veterans still collecting Social Security and that the 2016 US Presidential election was stolen – both also provably false. How do we penetrate this cult of preposterous propaganda?
Ending Medicaid would almost certainly do that!
Even Trump advisor Steve Bannon is pleading with Trump/Musk not to do this, as the vast majority of MAGA voters receive Medicaid benefits and they would suffer almost immediately is the program was DOGEd. They wouldn’t be able to buy their red hats, Melania meme currency, Chinese Trump Bibles and Trump shoes, but they also won’t be able to afford $20 eggs or, you know, healthcare.
Is it possible to break the spell the MAGA cult leader has cast on his minions? I’m not sure, but this would certainly be an interesting test of their blind fealty.
-B
Ishmael's Legacy 