The U.S. House Republicans’ proposed cuts to Medicaid are not just a political move. From the perspective of Interpersonal Neurobiology (IPNB), they represent an act of systemic cruelty. Not symbolic cruelty or ideological cruelty, but actual, lived cruelty felt in the bodies, relationships, and daily lives of millions of people.
Medicaid isn’t just a line item. It’s a lifeline. It provides access to basic medical care, mental health support, disability services, medications, and home-based assistance. For those navigating poverty, trauma, chronic illness, or disability, Medicaid is often the only thing standing between survival and collapse. Taking that away unravels regulation.
IPNB teaches us that well-being depends on certain core conditions: safety, connection, and regulation. These aren’t luxuries. They are physiological and relational necessities. When someone has access to care and knows they won’t be abandoned in crisis, their body can soften. Their mind can open. Their capacity for connection and contribution expands. This isn’t theory, but how the human system works.
But when care is withdrawn–when someone learns that their medications won’t be covered, that their in-home caregiver is being cut, that their therapy is no longer funded–what happens? Their system tightens. Their stress response intensifies. Survival strategies take over. This pulls them away from relationships, from trust, from learning, from hope. It isolates and overloads. It creates more suffering, more illness, more despair, and more strain on the very systems that are supposedly being “saved” money. This doesn’t has ripple effects across families, communities, and generations.
The proposed Medicaid cuts are not cost-saving measures. They are cost-amplifying mechanisms disguised as fiscal prudence. They push people into emergency rooms, institutions, homelessness, and breakdown. They also send a message that is neurologically devastating: You do not matter.
From an IPNB perspective, this kind of message disrupts the very foundation of mental and physical health. When systems and policies communicate abandonment, they don’t just fail to support people. They actively injure them. This is what cruelty by policy looks like. It’s not just the removal of care. It’s the institutionalization of neglect.
We live in a country with the resources to care. The decision not to care is not an accident. It’s a political and cultural choice, and it reflects who is deemed worthy of support and who is not. The consequences of that choice echo through our collective nervous system.
If we want a culture rooted in resilience, equity, and connection, we have to stop normalizing policies that cause harm. We have to name them for what they are. And these proposed Medicaid cuts are cruelty, plain and simple.
People who use their power to destabilize the most vulnerable and cause widespread human misery are not leaders. They are abusers in positions of authority. And like all abusers, they must be named, exposed, and removed.
Our collective survival depends on it.
This post includes content generated by ChatGPT, a language model developed by OpenAI. The AI-generated content has been reviewed and edited for accuracy and relevance.
