Republicans are the eugenicist party

The question is not so much why RFK Jr. became a Republican as why it took so long. Both The Worst Failson and Republican elites are motivated in substantial measure by the idea that both the poor and people with severe disabilities should not have access to healthcare:

Melissa Gonce used to cry when her son came home from his day program soaked in urine, dehydrated and distressed.

Jason, 28, is nonverbal and profoundly disabled, with significant cognitive limitations and little awareness of danger — vulnerabilities that require constant, watchful care.

Some nights, the van that was supposed to bring him home arrived hours late. Gonce would call and call, scanning the street, her mind racing. When he finally arrived, he was sometimes slumped over, pants wet down to his socks, his fingertips bitten raw.

Six years later, Gonce no longer worries about whether Jason is being cared for — because now she does the job herself. Under a Medicaid-funded program that allows families to be paid as caregivers, she earns about $67,000 a year to look after him full time, bathing, feeding and keeping him safe.

The program, Gonce said, “saved my family.”

Under his mother’s care, Jason’s seizures stabilized and he began making small gains in independence and daily routines. Her constant fears began to ease.

Now, families like hers worry that stability could soon collapse.

A sweeping federal spending package signed by President Donald Trump last year — his “big, beautiful bill” — is expected to slash Medicaid funding by about $1 trillion over the coming decade, just as many states are already struggling with rising costs. At the same time, a growing chorus of conservative policymakers and activists has begun to question whether the government should pay family caregivers at all, portraying the programs as wasteful and prone to fraud.

The result, advocates warn, could destabilize services that keep millions of elderly and disabled Americans, including Jason, alive in their communities. For caregivers like Gonce, that could mean financial ruin and impossible decisions over whether they will be able to keep their loved ones at home.

Molly Morris, co-founder of the Self-Direction Center, which advocates for Medicaid programs that empower recipients to manage their own care, said attacking paid family caregiving could overwhelm a system that’s already strained, with too few workers and long waiting lists for services.

“OK, you want to pull their finger out of the dam?” she said of paid family caregivers. “The dam is going to break.”

I’m still not sure that the evidence can support the idea that overruling Roe will make Republicans the healthcare party.