“We All Are Going to Die”: Cruelty and the Gospel According to Joni Ernst
At a town hall this week in Parkersburg, Iowa, Senator Joni Ernst offered a response so callous it instantly went viral. Confronted by a constituent worried about Medicaid cuts in the GOP’s latest budget proposal, Ernst brushed it off with a smile and a shrug: “Well, we all are going to die.”
The room groaned.
That moment wasn’t just insensitive—it was revealing. It captured the flippant cruelty at the heart of the Republican Party’s so-called “big, beautiful” budget bill. And it highlighted how far removed today’s GOP is from both fiscal honesty and the values they so often claim to uphold—particularly when they wrap themselves in the language of Christianity.
The False Premise: Medicaid and Immigrants
Ernst, like other Republicans, tried to justify the cuts by claiming they only target people who aren’t eligible for Medicaid—especially undocumented immigrants. She parroted the number “1.4 million” as if millions of “illegals” are fraudulently draining the system.
Here’s the truth: undocumented immigrants are already barred from accessing full Medicaid. They’re only eligible for Emergency Medicaid—coverage that helps someone in life-threatening situations like childbirth or trauma, and only if they meet strict income limits. Emergency Medicaid accounts for less than 1% of the program’s total spending.
That “1.4 million” figure? There’s no reliable source backing it up. And even if fraud were happening at that scale (it’s not), uncovering it would require a larger budget and more oversight staff—not less.
This isn’t about rooting out fraud. It’s about justifying the unjustifiable: cutting healthcare from people who need it and can’t afford it.
The Real Impact: Kicking People While They’re Down
According to the Congressional Budget Office, the GOP’s Medicaid proposal could strip health coverage from up to 8.6 million people over the next decade. That includes:
Low-income families
Elderly Americans in nursing homes
People with disabilities
Working-class folks who earn too much for traditional Medicaid but can’t afford private insurance
These aren’t people abusing the system. They are the system—exactly the people Medicaid was designed to protect. But instead of helping them, this budget proposes we sacrifice their well-being to give more tax breaks to the ultra-wealthy and the corporations already hoarding record profits.
It’s Robin Hood in reverse. It’s cruelty by design.
The Gospel According to Joni Ernst
The kicker came after the town hall, Ernst posted a video on social media, filmed in a cemetery, where she offered a sarcastic apology and suggested that those concerned about mortality should “embrace my lord and savior, Jesus Christ”.
Seriously.
This is the same Jesus who healed lepers and the poor for free. The same Jesus who said, “Whatever you did for the least of these, you did for me.” The same Jesus who flipped tables over financial exploitation in the temple and told a rich man to give away everything to follow him.
Jesus didn’t cut Medicaid. Jesus was Medicaid.
Quoting scripture while pushing policies that punish the poor isn’t just bad policy—it’s spiritual malpractice. If Ernst and her colleagues want to invoke Christianity, they might start by actually reading what Jesus said about money, justice, and mercy.
Moral Clarity in a Time of Deception
This isn’t just about one senator, or even one party. It’s about a broader pattern of politicians using faith as camouflage for policies that are deeply anti-Christian—and anti-human.
We should call it what it is: a betrayal of the values they claim to hold.
The truth is, budgets are moral documents. They reveal what we value and who we’re willing to leave behind. And if this budget passes, millions will suffer so that billionaires can keep stacking wealth they’ll never use.
We don’t need hollow platitudes. We need compassion. We need truth. And we need leaders who understand that public service is about serving the public.
Because if “we’re all going to die” is the best defense our leaders can offer for stripping healthcare from the poor—then it’s time for new leaders.