Back around 1993, a health insurance agent in the halls of the House of Representatives confronted First Lady Hillary Clinton, who also functioned as the proponent-in-chief of ClintonCare, Democrats’ earlier effort to take over the health care system.
The agent complained that if the Clinton plan were to become law, she would lose her job.
Clinton showed her disdain by asserting that the agent was obviously smart and would be able to find a new job in a different profession.
Democrats are once again hoping to destroy health insurance jobs.
While Democratic proponents of Medicare for All (M4A) boast their socialized medicine proposals would eliminate private health insurance, they have largely ignored the fact they would also eliminate American jobs.
Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D. Wash.), the lead author of the House version of M4A, with more than 100 Democratic cosponsors, tells us, “there’s about a million people we think will be displaced if ‘Medicare-for-all’ happens.”
“Displaced” is a euphemism for unemployed.
That number may be on the low side.
According to the Insurance Information Institute, in 2018 there were about 870,000 people working in health and life insurance. In addition, there’s about 825,000 insurance agents and brokers, and about 344,000 working in other insurance-related activities.
Of course, there is some overlap among these groups. For example, many of the 825,000 agents and brokers sell several types of insurance. So if health insurance is no longer an option, they might be able to focus more on life insurance or property and casualty coverage.
But clearly, 1 million or more people is a lot of newly unemployed.
Not to worry, though. The socialists have a solution, according to Jayapal. “We have thought carefully about how we’d take care of those folks because we think those people are very important. … We have set aside one percent a year of the total cost of the bill for five years to take care of a transition for employees in the private insurance sector.”
Maybe they could become bureaucrats! The tasks many of these people perform now won’t go away just because the government runs the health care system.
The federal government would have to hire thousands of new bureaucrats because the government, rather than private health insurance, would be processing all the claims, tracking fraud, overseeing hospitals and nursing homes, berating drug companies, and so on.
But don’t expect M4A proponents to be honest about the economic impact, either with respect to the cost or lost jobs, of their health care upheaval.
Since most progressives think the way to grow to economy is to grow the government, they will claim M4A will create lots of “good-paying jobs” and save trillions of dollars.
May 7, 2019