Dems, Media: Universal Health Care, Paid-Leave Will Solve Coronavirus [Supercut]
“Never let a crisis go to waste,” Rahm Emanuel famously said during the 2008 recession.
That same ethos is currently at play in the current Coronavirus crisis. Democrats have wasted no time using the health scare to push long-time progressive policy goals, including paid sick leave and “universal health care.”
During a recent Democratic press conference on the viral outbreak, Rep. Katherine Clark (D-Mass.) said the issue proved the need for paid family leave, collective bargaining, ObamaCare, expanding entitlements like Medicare and Medicaid — all of which she said are now isues of “national security.”
“With an outbreak at our doorstep, it’s important to recognize the risk that our nation runs when basic necessities like healthcare and paid family leave are out of reach for so many American families,” Rep. Clark said. “Just this week we will be extending two TSA workers the full protections of being federal employees under Title 5. This means they would be eligible for paid family leave, but we already have a notice veto intent from the White House.”
“This same week the White House is in court attempting again to dismantle ACA, and advocating for their budget proposal that would severely underfund Medicare and Medicaid,” she continued. “So expanding healthcare quickly becomes, in a crisis like this, not just a humane and right thing to do, but it becomes a question of national security.”
One of the biggest proponents of nationalizing America’s health-care system, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), said the Trump Administration’s Coronavirus response task force would “ideally” be led by “a person who believes in universal health care and paid sick leave.”
AOC’s preferred 2020 candidate, Sen. Bernie Sanders, said that if he were president during this crisis, America would “of course everyone would have paid medical leave,” so that they wouldn’t need to go to work but would still be paid.
Sanders supporter and left-wing filmmaker, Michael Moore, warned that the lack of “paid leave,” will mean the virus will spread more rapidly.
“I love how the — Trump’s Coronavirus people at those press conferences tell people that if they feel they’re sick, don’t go to work,” Moore told MSNBC. “Oh, really? This isn’t a European country where when you’re sick — you’re going to stay home and get your full pay. Not here. You’re telling Americans, half of whom are living from paycheck to paycheck, just stay home. They’re not going to stay home. And this is why we will perhaps, hopefully not, have more people infected because more people will go to work because … they can’t afford, they got to pay the rent.”
Rep. John Garamendi (D-Calif.) is also using the crisis to push federally mandated “paid leave.”
“A lot of the people are definitely not even working today or are working at a minimum wage,” Garamendi told CNN. “What they do need is paid sick leave.”
Members of the media are likewise using Coronavirus to push these policies.
MSNBC’s Ali Velshi chastised the United States for not having universal health care and paid sick leave.
“These are two basic things that the rest of the world has: universal health care, the rest of the developed world has universal health care and paid sick leave,” Velshi told his colleague, Joy Ann Reid. “We don’t have that, and as a result, people can’t make economic choices.”
On the same program, Reid hosted a panel explicitly about how Coronavirus proved the need for universal health care. One of her guests, the president of Business for Medicare for All, Wendell Potter, said: “This is an opportunity for us to come to grips with the fact that we absolutely have to transform our health care system. Taiwan is a country that’s right next to China, they have universal health care, and a system sort of like what Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren have been advocating, and they’re in much better shape than we are, right next to China, when it comes to dealing with this virus.”
In an interview with former secretary of Health and Human Services, Kathleen Sebelius, MSNBC’s Katy Tur asked “shouldn’t the government step in” and mandate paid leave?
Sebelius happily agreed with this leading question: “The government should step in, that would be the most logical choice.”
For more, check out the montage above.
