How Biden Could Win

 According to an article in Politico,  the White House is in a hand-wringing frenzy over all the red states that are gleefully cutting millions of people off Medicaid. Mass removals began in late spring, when Joe Biden officially and prematurely declared an end to the Covid public health emergency, That action brought, in millions of cases, an abrupt end to guaranteed medical coverage for struggling people. For the three years of the emergency, they'd been spared all the onerous bureaucratic hoop-jumping and dire need-proving in order to get care. 

 His declaration ending pandemic aid, the apologetics narrative goes, resulted from a relentless and irresistible pressure campaign from the governors of these same red states - states that never in a million years would give the election to that rascally radical socialist Joe Biden.

Now, it's the Biden administration's turn to be seen as "pressuring" these same red states to please don't be so hasty and enthusiastic about it. Spread the pain out more discreetly in hopes nobody will notice. You see, when an estimated 15 million struggling Americans are expected to lose Medicaid coverage by next year, just when Campaign '24 goes into full swing, Biden's boast that people are better off due to his "Bidenomics" miracle recovery might fall a tad flat

That's what the Democrats are most worried about: not winning the next election. The fact that millions of people already have been kicked off the Medicaid rolls, just as Covid cases increased by a whopping 50 percent this summer, is of secondary importance to them.

So rather than Biden taking to the bully pulpit to blast Republicans for kicking people off their health coverage when so many more are getting sick, his administration is reported to be quietly cajoling right-wing governors in states like Texas, Florida and Arkansas to go a little slower with the sadism that he himself facilitated with the stroke of a pen. In Arkansas alone, Governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders has already kicked off more than 300,000 Medicaid patients from their coverage in the past few months - including more than 100,000 children.

According to Politico,

But the administration has refused to publicly criticize individual states or even identify which ones it believes face the most serious issues, for fear of damaging its relationships with them. Though GOP-led states like Texas and Arkansas rank among the most aggressive in cutting people from Medicaid, states with Democratic governors such as Kansas and Kentucky are also dropping enrollees at high rates.

As long as it's bipartisan, it's like that sickly-sweet old Smuckers syrup TV commercial: it's just got to be good.  The problem is that during election season, the too-blatant embrace of eugenics as official US health policy is not a good look. 

But here's the dilemma. As the Duopoly is well aware, poor people don't turn out to vote in as great numbers as more well-off people. Therefore, all the Democrats think they  need do is to impress the well-off by posturing as "trying" to ameliorate the cruelty that they themselves passively-aggressively helped bring into being. As for the Republicans, they've apparently convinced enough of their constituents that losing their own health care is not as bad as the undeserving lazy malingerers of legend getting some of it. "Let them eat resentment" is one way of putting it. This works especially well where gerrymandering is the booster shot of choice.

The liberal opposition is the maudlin political theater described in the Politico article: 

On Capitol Hill, senior Democrats have grown increasingly frustrated with the administration’s approach, questioning its effectiveness and pushing for more aggressive steps — such as cutting off critical funding.... Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), who chairs the committee that oversees Medicaid, likened some states’ attempts to stop people from losing coverage to “waving at somebody as their car goes by, and going, well, we contacted you.” 

Heaven forfend that the Democrats run the risk of being called socialists by going so far as to bring single payer health legislation up for a floor debate.  If everybody had health care, liberal politicians  would never again have to exert themselves uttering empty threats to cut off funding to those mean old states. Without manufactured gridlock, they wouldn't even know what to do with themselves.

And with Covid cases rising quite drastically in the United States this summer, and with the number of Long Covid cases being a public health crisis in and of itself, President Biden could, with just another stroke of his executive pen, re-declare a public health emergency and order guaranteed health care for every man, woman trans person and child in this country, with no requirement to prove either financial need, employability or moral deservingness. All of those tens of millions of people who don't vote because they are too poor, too sick or too tired to care or expect much from politicians might change their minds and turn out for Joe Biden at the polls in 2024. He'll at least have earned his bragging rights.

Then again, they worry, if too many people get too healthy they might also develop the energy to take to the streets in protest of such things as student loan debt, capitalism-fueled climate disasters, and America's endless wars. And then what good would a second term for Biden and even a Democratic majority in both houses of Congress do them?

 Keeping the masses of people down and out is the engine that keeps the oligarchs who fund and control the politicians in power.  And tying for-profit predatory health coverage to one's work is the main way for the overlords to crush unions and to keep labor in line.

The fact that life expectancy in the United States is decreasing, and the suicide rate in this country increased to historic levels last year is, after all, just what the concierge doctor ordered for his wealthy clients. 

In the first few years of the pandemic, the suicide rate had actually decreased, given that most people got government stimulus checks, enhanced unemployment benefits, maximum food aid, and yes... Medicaid coverage. The suicide rate increased just as the temporarily enhanced welfare state, which had cut the rate of child poverty in half, began to be dismantled as a matter of deliberate bipartisan design. People who'd finally caught a break by having enough to eat and getting protection from evictions, suddenly had it all yanked away from them. 

These suicides are very much part and parcel of what Case and Deaton have accurately called "deaths of despair." The last thing in the world that desperate people need right now is some politician telling them that they're better off than they think they are.

Meanwhile, the bipartisan policy now in cruel effect is essentially just a dead heat on a merry-go-ground. The Republicans pressure the Democrats to kill off more poor people, and then the queasy, compliant Democrats pressure the Republicans to tone down the sadism just a wee bit. The actual people are crushed under the political stampede before they're fatally ejected from the rickety roller coaster. of late capitalism. (They just aren't personally responsible enough to fasten their frayed seatbelts!)

Welcome to the Eugenic States of America.