Laid off. No health insurance. Sick.

     "McConnell draws red line on liability protection in next coronavirus legislation."

              CBS News headline

Republicans are setting the stage for Democrats to re-align their coalition and re-gain the votes of the white working class. Republicans are choosing to be cruel. And tone deaf.

Republican senators are thinking about their donors, the owners of businesses. Not to the voters who put Trump into office.


Republican senators--like everyone--want the economy to open. Trump set the tone and policy: open up the economy and schools sooner rather than later. Yes, a few extra people will get sick, but not that many, not that sick, and the sooner we get this over with the sooner we can return to America made great again. That approach would have been a winning strategy had Covid disappeared in the spring, like magic.

But Covid remained.

Meanwhile, Republican senators are trapped by the policies that got them elected. They had convinced a majority of Americans back in 2010 that we did not want universal health care or even expanded health care. They are stuck being on the side of opposing the ACA, even though time and events have changed the public mood.

Republicans have a traditional position against a higher minimum wage, convinced it will hurt small businesses and make it harder for marginal workers to find work. 

They oppose requirements that employers provide health insurance and have enabled laws that let employers skirt around providing it. The result of these two policies is that there is a vast army of people without health insurance paid an amount that leaves them in poverty, the "working poor." 

Republican orthodoxy was to consider health care a high price consumer good, a matter of choice. Then Congressman, now Fox opinion host, Jason Chaffetz put it this way:

     "And you know what? Americans have choices. And they've got to make a choice. And so, maybe rather than getting that new iPhone that they just love and they want to go spend hundreds of dollars on that, maybe they should invest it in their own health care. They've got to make those decisions for themselves.”

And meanwhile, too, Republicans want to cut unemployment benefits, the better to incentivize people to take jobs, even at risk of Covid. They are hearing from their small businessmen supporters that some of them want to re-open their businesses, on a limited basis perhaps, but that some workers don't want to take the jobs. If the laid off worker fought through the tangle and delays of getting unemployment payments via the overburdened state systems, with the extra $600/week add-on, they lose money by coming back to work, and part time work disrupts the unemployment benefit in place. Don't complicate things. Stay home. Stay safer. Get paid. It is a rational decision.

But meanwhile, yet another complication: employer liability. Who is responsible if a worker, comes to work for an employer, works in close proximity to others, and catches the virus in a workplace hotspot?  Republicans officeholders recognize this to be a giant concern for employers and they have the answer: the worker's liability.

Put it all together, here is the Republican position: People in low wage jobs, including "essential workers" only earn enough to live in deep poverty, don't get health insurance, but are required to go to work in jobs that might put them at risk of Covid, and if they do get sick, the liability is theirs. 

This suite of policies make sense only if Republicans are thinking primarily of the owners of small businesses, the donor class, not the workers. This gives Democrats the window of opportunity that they need to restore their connection with the working class, the "regular American" who had been an essential part of the Democratic coalition. 

Covid-19 is communicable, which changes the calculation a critical mass of people might have about the health of the person in the next neighborhood. It isn't an I-phone. No one chooses to get sick, not even people who refuse to wear masks. Americans need people in certain occupations to show up to work. We need other people to stay home. We need the produce clerk who isn't feeling well, and who has a wife who tested positive, to stay home from work himself. We want the wife to get health care. We want the produce clerk to self-quarantine. We don't want his incentives to be to "chance it" and go to work. 

If he brings the disease to the grocery store, and fellow clerks, each working 29 hours a week to be kept from being eligible for health benefits, get sick, and the cost is borne by them, then Republicans are giving Democrats exactly what they need to make their case for a major re-think of the health care system. We would have a sympathetic victim, indeed lots of them, young and old, Black and White and Latinix. These victims will be the Rosa Parks equivalent, those in-our-face victims who create a political majority ready for change. And we would have a villain, on record insisting of putting in place an unfair and unsafe situation, notwithstanding its cruelty, punishing the brave, the most vulnerable.

Events are changing the narrative. Health care isn't a consumer good. It is a matter of public health, and people who deny that reality are cruel. We have a simple story to tell and understand. Republicans would be screwing the little guy and Democrats would be the rescuer.