It appears New York is going to compensate for firing a significant percentage of its nurses by enlisting the national guard to fill the gaping holes in its health care system.
This is in contrast to the Alabama approach of realizing that giving ultimatums to people you need more than they need you might not be the best approach.
I can’t imagine national guard troops are a good solution in the long term, or even the medium term, particuarly if you are just getting into your seasonal hospital spike and it might be worse than ever. Knowingly or not, New York seems to be participating in a game of chicken with its now former employees, and I don’t think it’s a game it can win.
HCWs don’t seem to need NY hospitals (or hospitals in any region that wants to force their hand on medical decisions). Most of them either don’t need the income, due to a second earner at home or the possibility of retirement, or can change professions or move to one of the areas where their services are in high demand. Gov. Hochul and her ilk think they can pretend the hospital system doesn’t need them back for long enough to make them desperate.
But what if they don’t come back? The powers that be refuse to admit they made a mistake. They likely don’t even know how. They double down. So when winter comes and the ICUs are full and the national guard has been playing nurse for 3 months, what will they do? What can they do?
We already know what their first action will be: blame the unvaccinated. It won’t matter who is filling up the beds, and they won’t be eager to disclose or even track those numbers, but the data from the UK and Israel makes it quite clear: vaccination isn’t going to help. And the states that are about to get hit are all ready some of the most vaccinated in the country. So they’ll push boosters harder. That won’t work either.
Now what? It’s December, northern hospitals don’t have staff to man the ICU beds they need, and a significant percentage of what they do have aren’t career HCW, but whoever they can get to fill those spots in the meantime. Will they actually move to the kind of triage they are already discussing? First priority to those who have had the most shots? Hospital funds only going to states with over 50% booster rate? We’ve already seen what government control of monoclonal antibodies has done to politicize distribution, why not nationalize the whole thing and really start playing favorites?
How bad can this get?
In that questions lies wisdom. Again, they don’t know how to admit a mistake. There’s no incentive for them to. Deaths or despair or economic ruin don’t really matter to these people. Those are just talking points to get them more power. And no one ever gets more power from backing down.
So how bad can it get? As bad as you let it.
Many people about to lose their jobs because they refuse to let the government decide their medical treatments might have second thoughts. Particularly the health care workers. If it’s going to be that rough this winter, don’t you have a duty to go back? Isn’t patient health more important than your freedom? Certainly that will be the rallying cry we will hear. When the state governments start losing their game of chicken, we will hear all about those selfish few who gave up on the sick. And not just those being laid off right now. I suspect that as conditions worsen, we are going to see HCW leaving in droves, because the more control government takes of the situation, the worse it gets for all concerned. Even the nurse who glad got vaccinated this summer may be fleeing the building they are working triples shifts for a week with no end in sight and new mandates and directives coming every day which are clearly making things worse.
And how selfish! How could you quit when that’s just going to make things harder for those that remain?
And that is the hardest lesson to learn. It only gets better when you refuse to make sacrifices for the benefit of those evil enough to call you selfish for not cleaning up the mess they made. It will be hard to walk away. It will be uncertain; it will be terrifying. You will be called every name they can think of to guilt you into propping up the disaster they are creating: anti-vax, selfish, ignorant, science denier, eventually even domestic terrorist if they think they can get away with it. But walk away you must, because it is only your sacrifice that allows them to perpetuate this monstrosity.
Great article.