Have Y’all ever read Charles Dickens’s famous novella A Christmas Carol?
I mean, lots of people have seen the film adaptation which airs every Christmas season, but they haven’t read the book. If you have, do you remember that part in the story where two men ask Ebenezer Scrooge to donate some money to help the poor?
That ole gaunt coin-clutching pasty gargoyle was like nahhh, I’m good. He said, that if they would rather die, “they had better do it, and decrease the surplus population.”
With that line, I think Dickens was sending readers a message about the moral depravity of a cruel fictional miser who regarded poor people not as human beings who are worthy of care, but as useless economic burdens who are disposable. In Scrooge’s mind, the deaths of poor people were a cost-saving measure that would help society operate more efficiently.
And quite frankly, Dickens was issuing a stark warning about what happens when the capitalist overlords start treating poverty as a personal defect instead of a symptom of structural failures, and death is considered an efficient solution. Yeah, Scrooge is the stingy rich asshole in this story but he embodies an entire ruling-class philosophy. It goes like this: If you are poor or sick and your body cannot be extracted from to help produce wealth, if you can’t support yourself without public assistance, then this government doesn’t owe you shit. Not money. Not food. Not medicine. Not respect or dignity. Nothin’ that might ensure your survival.
That was 1843.
Now, here we are 183 years later in Donald Trump’s America, where his regime has adopted the morality of misers who have essentially adopted federal healthcare policy that is asking, right in our faces mind you, “How much money could we save if we simply let them suffer?” If you are poor, sick, elderly, or disabled the Trump regime considers you to be a figure on a balance sheet. And they keep finding ways to make sickness even more expensive and survival more precarious.
The latest news says that starting in 2027, the administration will terminate a federal program that helps hold down premiums for stand-alone Medicare Part D prescription-drug plans. Part D helps folks buy things like insulin, inhalers, blood thinners, cancer drugs, and heart medications that KEEP THEM ALIVE!
Now keep in mind, we’re talking about 25 million people who are chronically ill, mostly elderly, and on fixed incomes. There are also some younger folks with serious disabilities. These people are already worrying about whether their monthly Social Security check will stretch far enough.
“Dr.” Mehmet Oz, the Trump official running the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, says that most beneficiaries won’t see their premium rise more than $10 a month, and some may actually pay less. But other projections from the Trump administration are estimating a 45% rise up to $20 more per month. But $10 or $20 is not nothin’ when you got people out here who are already rationing groceries, skipping pills, cutting pills in half, and postponing doctor visits because they can’t afford the co-pays while these bureaucrats hide their cruelty by pretending like these small monthly figures and repeated extractions don’t eventually accumulate into crisis and death.
Now, the Trump regime says that by ending this healthcare subsidy, the federal government will save $3.6 billion next year. Yes, yes, of course. The overlords need that money freed up for war bombs, ICE terror raids, tax breaks for their billionaire friends who already own everything, and whatever other fresh hell chicanery, grift or gold-plated vanity project Trump has cooking.
These evil assholes only preach about fiscal-responsibility when poor, sick, elderly and disabled people need help staying alive. They consider using public monies that help ordinary people to be an illegitimate interference in the market, just like Ebenezer Scrooge. And what they really want is to make stand-alone drug plans more expensive and push more people into privately administered Medicare Advantage plans, which already covers more than 30 million people and generates huge revenues for insurance corporations.
But you don’t need to be a policy expert to see what’s happening here. The Trump regime is a fucking death cult! And I’m not being hyperbolic when I say this. No, these assholes aren’t meeting in a basement somewhere under the White House with lit candles and chanting DIE, DIE, DIE. But they repeatedly make policy choices that they know full well will increase sickness, untreated illness, and preventable death. And then they have the gall to rebrand the human casualties as some damn fiscal responsibility.
And here’s what gets me . . . last week we watched a musty Republican-led committee and an obsessed Sen. Rand Paul drag and humiliate and try to criminalize an 85-year-old Dr. Anthony Fauci over his handling of the COVID-19 pandemic. Not only has this man fought AIDS and Ebola, the man saved millions of lives during the pandemic. Meanwhile, our federal health apparatus is headed by Robert F. Kennedy, a swamp swimmer who snorted cocaine off toilet seats and doesn’t know shit about science, has bent America’s machinery of public health toward misinformation, mass confusion, and ideological grievance.
At the end of the day, they want to manufacture public distrust in scientists, doctors, and public institutions because they want people trapped between illness, propaganda and the market. And guess what? The sabotage is working. Several recent surveys have already documented the collapsing trust around public health. While most Americans still believe in science, trust in scientists is now sharply divided along partisan lines, with white Republican confidence in science falling from 85% in 2020 to now 64%. We’re living in a country were expertise = elitism + evidence = propaganda + inconvenient facts = conspiracy.
Once you have a population that distrusts science and believes public health is the enemy, then it becomes easier to lie to them, sell them fake cures, and then the government can more easily dismantle institutions and programs that keep folk healthy and alive.
That is why ending the Medicare subsidy belongs in the same story. It is not simply about one program or one premium. It is part of a coordinated assault on the very idea that government has an obligation not to abandon the sick and the poor.
Please understand that when I call this regime a “death cult,” this is not rhetorical flourish. Look around, Y’all. Not only have these misers repeatedly made cuts to resources people need to stay alive, they’ve also restricted food assistance, weakened protections against air and water pollution and our food system. They keep terrorizing immigrant families away from hospitals and killing them in broad daylight. They’ve let rural clinics collapse in the very voting blocs that support their MAGA agenda. And they do this while telling folk they should have planned better.
I need Y’all to understand that this governing philosophy is a hallmark of authoritarian white supremacist logic which is genocidal to the core. And it ain’t just about skin color. Whiteness as a system, which has always organized life around categories of value, will sacrifice its own to preserve itself. Whiteness has always organized life through categories of value. If you’re not healthy, productive, or obedient then you are not entitled to the nation’s resources.
And if you think your whiteness will save you, you’ve got another thing coming. Because history has shown over and over again that whiteness may promise you proximity to power, but capitalism still send your ass the invoice. And should you get sick, your vulnerability will not only become a business model because the overlords know you will likely be unable to organize, protest, boycott your insulin or heart meds, negotiate while undergoing chemo, or punish these assholes politically.
Now, we aren’t gonna hear the Trump regime announce that it wants people to DIE, DIE, DIE. But it will most certainly continue creating the conditions that make preventable death more likely. And they’ll stand there, without batting an eyelash, and treat the body count as a legitimate cost of doing business.
Or, maybe, as Ebenezer Scrooge put it, a convenient way to “decrease the surplus population.”
Thanks for reading. If this piece moved you or made you think, please consider becoming a paid subscriber. Your subscription keeps my Substack fueled and unfiltered. Paid subscriptions also help me support HBCU journalism students who need laptops, DSLR cameras, tripods, mics, lights, software, conference travel, reporting trips, and even food from our pantry. We appreciate your support!
A NOTE TO READERS: Commenting has recently been reserved for paid subscribers only due to the deluge of racist filth under my posts. So if you want to participate in the conversations here, please upgrade.
THIS CONTENT IS WRITTEN IN THE AUTHOR’S PERSONAL CAPACITY. ANY OPINIONS EXPRESSED ARE THE AUTHOR’S OWN AND SHOULD NOT BE ATTRIBUTED TO HOWARD UNIVERSITY OR MORGAN STATE UNIVERSITY.
