ABC News Panelist: Make Vaccination Required for Government Health Care

ABC News panelist Margaret Hoover said on This Week with George Stephanopoulos on Sunday that the government should require patients receiving public health care — including Veterans Affairs care — to be vaccinated for coronavirus.

Hoover, who hosts the Firing Line on PBS, used that example to show how the government should make life “almost impossible” for the unvaccinated:

If you are going to get government-provided health care, if you’re getting VA treatment, Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, anything, and Social Security, obviously, isn’t health care, you should be getting the vaccine, OK, because you’re going to have to — we’re — we are going to have to take care of you on the backend. So there are a lot of things we can do without calling it a mandate but to just make it almost impossible for people to — to live their lives without being protected and protecting the rest of us.

She did not explain what would happen to unvaccinated patients who required emergency care in public health systems.

Hoover’s comment was seconded by former Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel, who cited his father’s experience as a pediatrician. Emanuel’s brother, Ezekiel Emanuel, was one of the architects of Obamacare, and championed the individual mandate, forcing Americans to buy health insurance.

Emanuel added that just as children have to show proof of immunization for common childhood diseases upon entering school, Americans should have to show such proof to access public services — including, in this context, health care.

He admitted that “30 percent of the medical profession not vaccinated,” calling it “an unbelievable wrong example.”

Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of the recent e-book, Neither Free nor Fair: The 2020 U.S. Presidential Election. His recent book, RED NOVEMBER, tells the story of the 2020 Democratic presidential primary from a conservative perspective. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.