The Left would sacrifice the unvaccinated. By Kat Rosenfeld.
In the United States, a Covid hospitalisation costs $29,000 on average; if you’re sick enough to require an ICU stay and a ventilator, that average soars to $156,000. … There’s a looming crisis of Covid medical debt.
Already, their stories are legion: there’s the flight attendant who spent a week in the hospital with Covid, then spent six months fighting with his insurance company over the $25,000 bill. There’s the Phoenix family who were hit with a million-dollar claim summary and a bill for $700,000 while still grieving their father’s death. There’s the dental office manager, stricken with long Covid and still too sick to work, drowning in tens of thousands of dollars of medical debt.
Reliably hypocritical, because it’s not the principle but the pursuit of power:
Ten years ago, stories like these would have been held up by our country’s Left wing as proof of the continued, desperate need for healthcare reform. …
Indeed, the idea that the Left would ever limit someone’s access to healthcare on moral or ideological grounds was considered laughable — a bogeyman invented by the Right in the form of a memorably hysterical panic about “death panels.” …
On December 6, Illinois state representative Jonathan Carroll advanced legislation to make unvaccinated Covid patients pay out of pocket for the cost of their medical treatment, whether or not they were insured, no matter how astronomical those costs might be. …
Just a few days later, Atlantic editor David Frum … encourag[ed] hospitals to “quietly triage emergency care to serve the unvaccinated last.”
And last week, American supermarket chain Kroger announced that unvaccinated employees would be subject to a monthly surcharge on their health plans — and that if they contract Covid, they will not be given paid emergency leave.
In all these cases, the notion of depriving vaccine holdouts of affordable treatment was met with widespread acclaim — in keeping with the idea, promoted by everyone from the paper of record to the current President, that the pandemic would’ve been over ages ago if only they’d sucked it up and gotten their shot.
And yet the folks cheering on these measures are the very same people who, only a few short years ago, mocked accusations that they supported ideologically-driven triage, while also grieving the indignity and suffering that punitive healthcare policies would inflict on the most vulnerable among us. …
We’ve certainly come a long way from the rhetoric of the 2010s, and from a progressive Left that once defined itself by its willingness to care for other people without caveats. What used to be a narrative of universal compassion has been replaced by a tribal snarl, one to which we feel entitled in our eternally self-conscious selflessness. My mask protects you, but your unvaccinated status is an attack on me — and so anything I do to you in retaliation is an act of self-defence. …
There’s no need to imagine the impact of this ideological shift on our civic discourse, however: that, we can see already, every time the tribe that used to pride itself on compassion refers to the unvaccinated as “plague rats.” …
It’s one thing to find the unvaccinated frustrating; it’s another to openly fantasise about using the power of the state to punish them for their noncompliance, and another still to express dark and malicious glee at the prospect of their suffering or death. …
The American Left should be deeply worried about the state of its soul.
Moral arguments have almost no effect on the modern left. As immigration policies show, they are perfectly prepared to wreck their countries and trash democracy to achieve power. Besides, the unvaccinated mainly don’t vote left, so it’s to the left’s electoral advantage if they are left to die. What would Stalin do?
