At the bottom of a Guardian story about a rural Missouri county’s hospital teetering on the brink of closure before poll-tested work requirements meant to punish those able-bodied gamers “collecting Medicaid checks” – which aren’t actually a thing – kick in are the shot and chaser from pretty obviously MAGA pharmacist Jim Brands, who tells the paper he’s in favor, even as the question isn’t whether his business will suffer losses from mass un-enrollment but how bad the hit will be.

“Just seeing this community, the situation it’s in, the poverty, we’ve got to get people to work. There are a ton of able-bodied people that could work that choose not to,” Brands said as his brain performed a subroutine implanted by the human software engineers at Fox News.

STDOUT Error: Exception found. “To me, there’s got to be a better way to weed out the fraud and not step on the toes of the people who need it,” Brands then said, as if pleading for that exception to his cold, uncaring masters to figure out a way for his political brainwashing not be at cross-purpose with his desire to not have to sell more loose Oxycontins out the back door to make ends meet because the ivermectin isn’t moving as well as it used to. Back before the people who bought it died.

Also note the “we’ve got to get people to work” from the first half. Is this guy fucking hiring? He sign the lease on an empty storefront in a town a few miles down the road and getting ready to open up another location of his pharmacy? Talking to the bank about a loan to stand up a new concern to manufacture equipment for counting pills and filling prescriptions? Spitballing an RFP for an innovative new pharmacy software platform to address the shittiness of the one he uses now?

Probably not because someone else should do something about this. Something besides not voting for it, since that’d be like voting for some liberal beta male with a nasally, high pitched voice.

Key word being “liberal,” thus it does not apply to Brands’s congressman, Republican Jason Smith.

Another instant classic quote comes from the minutes of a recent county commission meeting at which the hospital’s increasingly likely closure and the Medicaid work requirements were both discussed – but the latter was seen as less of a problem than the former. Or not a problem at all.

“We got a guy around here, I guess he’s still around. He’s legally blind but he goes deer hunting every year. There’s just so much fraud… it sounds like we’re right in the middle of it,” Commissioner Baughn Merideth said and holy fucking shit these people are so, so irreparable and irredeemable.

Walk through this: Imagine Meridith had actual evidence that this “guy around here,” should he even exist, is indeed defrauding Medicaid by having it pay for his doctor’s visits and prescriptions, and-

Shit, even that’s crediting this fucking nonsense too much because it sounds like what that peckerwood is complaining about is actually disability insurance fraud and not Medicaid fraud.

Stupid, stupid goddamned hicks. Still just try to follow along. Pretend it’s more than rumor or hearsay being used as spurious validation for their open support of policies making their area’s already dire healthcare situation considerably worse. That this legally blind individual was not simply accompanying friends or family on the deer hunts to get fresh air and enjoy the outdoors while they shot the ungulates but was spotting and blasting the animals along with them. That Meredith had credible accounts from multiple other individuals who witnessed said “guy” doing as such.

This isn’t to fruitlessly prattle about all elected officials having a responsibility to report unlawful activity and fraud that costs taxpayers even if investigating and prosecuting said fraud isn’t within that elected official’s remit. Expecting such a display of civic virtue from these guys is like expecting Jason Smith to get caught having a threesome with Anna Paulina Luna and Lauren Boebert.

And yet not bothering to ask around, pick up the phone, make a few calls to the DA’s office, the state public benefits services’ investigative unit, even the county sheriff, whoever might be interested in this, only to then just sit there and say “Y’all know fraud’s a problem cause I been hearing bout this one sum’bitch who say he blind legally but been out shootin’ ten-pointers wit a thirty-eight. So we very much welcomin of them work requirements for Obamacare or Medicare or whatever the fuck them socialist queers in the fake news media callin’ it these days” in front of voters is nevertheless still a failure on its own politicized terms in a world of “so much fraud.”

Like at the very, very fucking bare minimum does Meridith not want to be able to make it at least look like he’s doing something by being tough on some very vague and unspecified ongoing act of fraud? How does one consume that much right wing media as this dipshit most certainly does and at no point does the very simple concept and political utility of a “criminal referral” manage to percolate into his malformed cranium? This is what counts as performative “governance” these days in rural Missouri, just passively parroting that a guy who may or may not still be in the area as a data point in service of the national party’s absolute skullfucking your voters will suffer in just 18 months?

It’s almost like what Jason Smith and Josh Hawley and Eric Schmitt just voted to do to this county isn’t cruelty but actually a form of mercy. That more will suffer and worse but at least it’ll be quicker.