Should we pay the unvaccinated to stay home because the COVID-19 vaccine frightens them? It’s a completely absurd, even dangerous idea, but one that Kansas Republicans are barreling toward putting into law during a special session later this month.
One bill they’re pushing would actually provide unemployment benefits to workers who lose their jobs for refusing to get the COVID vaccine. Another would create a no-questions-asked, crater-sized religious exemption from the vaccine.
So, let’s get this straight: After complaining the past year that too many people were being paid too much money to stay at home so they could stay safe, Republicans now want to pay the unvaccinated to stay home and remain unsafe to others.
The hypocrisy would be hilarious, except that it endangers the public health by incentivizing people not to get vaccinated.
“We had a lot of debate toward the end of the session just this last year about how we needed to quit paying people unemployment because they were sitting at home rather than wishing to work,” says state Rep. Vic Miller, a Topeka Democrat. “It does seem to be a bit of a pivot.”
And that’s a bit of an understatement.
Those unemployment benefits Republicans railed against over the last year were paid to workers who lost their jobs through no fault of their own. Now they want to pay unemployment to workers who lose their jobs because they refuse to be vaccinated.
Even the conservative-minded Kansas Chamber of Commerce is warning against the GOP proposal, and for good reason. Noting the state could be liable for $606 million to $5.6 billion in unemployment to the unvaccinated, Kansas Chamber President and CEO Alan Cobb said in a statement this week that the proposed bill “could cause significant financial harm to the state’s (unemployment) trust fund, negatively impact its solvency, and lead to increased taxes on the Kansas businesses who are struggling to recover from the pandemic.”
Absolutely. The proposal would take power away from small business owners, exacerbate the labor shortage, drain the unemployment fund and create a horrible precedent by carving out special groups for unemployment benefits.
Senate Minority Whip Pat Pettey, Democrat of Kansas City, Kansas, is alarmed by all that and more, particularly by the precedent it would set. What other supposedly aggrieved groups might want unemployment benefits going forward?
In addition, Pettey — with Miller a member of the Kansas Legislature’s Special Committee on Government Overreach and the Impact of COVID-19 Mandates that is considering the bills — is very concerned about the GOP’s companion bill allowing no-questions-asked religious exemptions from the vaccine.
“This really just opens up the door to anything,” she says. “There’s really no responsibility on the part of the employee to provide any verification that they have a religious exemption. It does set up a very special category that actually is a blank check.”
Pettey, a retired educator, also wonders whether a new religious loophole for vaccines might trickle down to schools, worsening COVID’s spread.
The committee scheduled public hearings on the two bills for Friday. And if two-thirds of lawmakers in both chambers sign on, the bills will be debated at a rare and costly special session of the full Legislature Nov. 22.
No. Just no. Paying people to stay home for being unvaccinated is inane and insane.
