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Americans used to like Dr. Mehmet Oz |
The same day I posted about Senator Joni Ernst’s faulty rhetoric surrounding Medicaid cuts, Dr. Mehmet Oz claimed that uninsured people should “prove that you matter.” The cardiac surgeon, Oprah darling, and failed Senate candidate is now Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services Administrator, meaning he administers decisions for who receives assistance in paying medical bills. His criterion for proving one matters? “Get a job or at least volunteer or … go back to school.”
Last time, I got Aristotelean and dissected Senator Ernst’s rhetoric, noting that she changed the “stasis of argument” mid-sentence. That is, she pretended to misunderstand the core dispute, sanding off nuance while condescending to her constituents.. When someone said people would die unnecessarily, Ernst pretended they meant people would die at all. She thought it appropriate to remind constituents that humans are mortal—and, in her tone-deaf follow-up, sound an altar call for Jesus Christ.
While Ernst’s constituent wanted to argue the morality of preventable death, and Ernst veered dishonestly onto the fact of mortality, a friend reminded me this argument skirted an important issue. Who will die first? When the government makes decisions about paying medical bills, the outcomes aren’t morally neutral: chronically ill, disabled, and elderly Americans stand the most to lose. The same bloc of Americans whom, you’ll recall, certain politicians permitted to die during the pandemic.
Dr. Oz said what Senator Ernst only implied, that hastening human mortality is okay for certain undesirables. This administration, and indeed conventional American conservatism throughout my lifetime, has tied human worth to economic productivity, and especially to productivity for other people. If someone needs assistance, America’s authorities won’t help you create a business, learn a skill, or otherwise evolve to benefit your community. Their imagination can’t expand beyond getting a job working for someone else.
Nor was this subtext. Oz said aloud: “do entry-level jobs, get into the workforce, prove that you matter.” This correlation between “you matter” and “you work for others” has lingered beneath much of America’s work ethic throughout my lifetime—and, as an ex-Republican, I once believed it, or anyway accepted it. But as anybody who’s faced the workforce recently knows, today’s working economy isn’t a source of meaning or dignity; it often actively denies both.

Even laying aside demi-Marxist arguments like “owning the means of production” or “the surplus value of labor,” employment spits in the human face. Minimum wage hasn’t increased in America since 2009, and as anybody who’s worked a fast food dinner shift knows, employers who pay minimum wage definitely would pay less if the law permitted. Even if the workers receive enough hours to qualify for employer-provided health insurance, they mostly can’t afford the employee co-pay.
Lest anybody accuse me of misrepresenting Dr. Oz, let’s acknowledge something else: he lays this onus on “able-bodied” Americans. We might reasonably assume that he expects healthy, young, robust workers to enter the workforce instead of lollygagging on the public dime. But even if we assume they aren’t doing that already (and I doubt that), the pandemic taught many workers important lessons about how America values labor. Specifically, that it doesn’t, except through empty platitudes.
In 2020, executives, attorneys, bureaucrats, and others went into lockdown. Americans laughed at highly skilled professionals trying to do business through Zoom, thus avoiding the virus. Meanwhile, manual trades, retail jobs, construction, and other poorly paid positions were deemed “essential” and required to continue working. These jobs are not only underpaid and disdained, but frequently done by notably young or notably old workers, disabled, chronically ill, required employment to qualify for assistance, or otherwise vulnerable.
As a result, the workers most vulnerable to the virus, faced the most persistent risk. Sure, we praised them with moralistic language of heroism and valor, but we let them get sick and die. Americans’ widespread refusal to wear masks in restaurants and grocery stores put the worst-paid, most underinsured workers at highest risk. Many recovered only slowly; I only recently stopped wheezing after my second infection. Many others, especially with pre-existing conditions, simply died.
Dr. Oz has recapitulated the longstanding belief that work is a moral good, irrespective of whether it accomplishes anything. He repeats the myth, prevalent since Nixon, that assistance causes laziness, citation needed. And despite hastily appending the “able-bodied” tag, he essentially declares that he’s okay with letting the most vulnerable die. Because that’s the underlying presumption of Dr. Oz, Senator Ernst, and this administration. To them, you’re just a replaceable part in their economic machine.