What’s 2 million out of work Americans between friends, right? In particular, ‘woke’ Liz Warren friends, who understand you can’t make a socialist omelet without breaking a few employment eggs.
In Warren’s case, it’s the estimated 2 million Americans who would lose their private-sector health care jobs when she takes insurance from about 180 million Americans and puts us all on the government health care dole.
In May, the left-leaning Kaiser Health News site published analysis predicting that shutting down the current health care system “would mean job losses in the millions,” and notes that the industry is “now the biggest employer in at least a dozen states.” In Massachusetts, the single-largest employer is Partners Healthcare with 68,000 employees, and the 13 health care companies in the state comprise more than 170,000 employees by themselves.
A New Hampshire Public Radio reporter asked her about those job losses this week, and to her credit, Warren didn’t do her usual health care two-step. “I agree,” she conceded. “I think this is part of the cost issue and should be part of a cost plan.”
And just like that — poof! Two million jobs gone in the name of “social justice,” which is the #Woke way of saying “Vote Liz Warren!”
It’s astonishing how cavalier lefties like Liz Warren and Hillary Clinton are with our jobs. Remember in 2016 when once (and future?) Democratic POTUS candidate Hillary went to Ohio and announced, “We’re going to put a lot of coal miners and coal companies out of business.”
[https://www.theatlantic.com/notes/2016/03/gaffe-track-hillarys-employment-plan-for-coal-miners/473592/]
Screw those coal-mining hillbillies — we’ve got wealthy suburban Democratic donors who want taxpayer subsidies for their new Teslas!
And why is it that Warren, who’s still holding out on admitting that her Medicare for All government system will require middle-class tax hikes, has no problem admitting she’s going to put millions of Americans out of work?
It’s because the American left simply doesn’t value work. They’re more than happy to hand you a government check rather than help you find a productive job. Remember how astonished the audience was at the Democratic debate when entrepreneur Andrew Yang suggested that most Americans might not want a federally guaranteed make-work job? That they might prefer to earn a paycheck by doing something worthwhile?
Then again, Yang wants to send everyone a “free” check from the government for $1,000 a month, so …
The direct path from socialized medicine to a European-style socialist government is obvious — both to its supporters like Warren and Bernie Sanders, and to its opponents.
“Elizabeth Warren’s delusional and impractical approach to health care is as reckless as it is deeply concerning. Her belief that the removal of 2 million jobs, half of which would be middle-class support staff at hospitals and doctors’ offices, shows her lack of a basic understanding of the workforce and economics,” Marc Palazzo of the Coalition Against Socialized Medicine told me yesterday.
Warren’s answer is that so many people paying their bills working in the health care industry is the problem.
“How much of our health care dollars have not gone to health care, how many of those dollars have been pulled out in other directions,” she told NHPR. The fact that these businesses make a profit — “after all of the executive salaries, all of the administrative people” — is itself an argument for government health care.
She’s right that a lot of people make a living handling billing and paperwork and scheduling, etc. But she’s wrong when she suggests that all this will end once she and Bernie are running the health care biz.
People will still be handling your health care services, but instead of private-sector workers who compete with other companies and can get fired if they’re lousy at their jobs, your health care will be in the hands of some government hack’s cousin who got the gig by donating to the Democratic Party and couldn’t get fired if he just left your paperwork stacked in an office for years at a time.
Don’t believe me? Three letters: “R. M. V.”