New York City Governor Kathy Hochul’s plan to deploy the National Guard to fix her mess after firing possibly thousands of healthcare workers across the state is a flawed plan and here’s why.
Fall is coming. So is virus season. Last fall, COVID-19 cases began to climb again in late September, just about where we are now, this year. Cases jumped from 253 per day in August to nearly 5,000 per day as fall became winter and the second wave of the virus took hold. This was before the more contagious delta variant, but it was also before vaccinations.
Hochul is trying to reel from a self-induced healthcare emergency. After serving the frontlines for almost a year without vaccines, she is now telling those frontline workers who survived the COVID-19 trench warfare to vaccinate…or else, lose your job.
She’s more than willing to give the jobs of hardworking Americans to foreigners. She has no problem shifting her health emergency to foreign nations by depleting their healthcare ranks. Worse, she wants to activate the National Guard to fill in for seasoned medical professionals with longstanding relationships with the hospital networks they work for.
Worse, Hochul is overlooking one critical aspect of deploying healthcare-related MOS National Guard troops. Most of those in the medical field in the guard are also doctors, nurses, EMTs, technicians, and assistants in their own local medical communities.
Not only will Hochul be reallocating those individuals, she is doing nothing but shifting the sand on the hourglass of a looming public health crisis she alone has created.
Worse, those National Guard troops will be turning in their high-paying private-sector medical jobs and will be deployed at a much lower National Guard rate. A sergeant in the National Guard makes just $796 per week when deployed. It doesn’t matter how many hours they work, their pay is the same.
Hochul hasn’t addressed who will fill in at their medical job back home where they may work as a lab tech, a nurse, even a doctor, for many of the officers in the National Guard.
Hochul’s plan is flawed and she is about to commit political malpractice that could lead to a health crisis and pandemic like the country has never seen before. It could make Andrew Cuomo’s nursing home debacle of 2020 look like child’s play.