In New York, free health care for hookers, everyone else pays full fare?

By Monica Showalter

In New York state, where locals pay some of the highest health care costs in the nation, hookers are about to get a free ride.

According to the New York Post:

Gov. Kathy Hochul’s administration is going to bat for the “world’s oldest profession” by launching a free health care program for sex workers — a move critics are slamming as encouraging a campaign to decriminalize prostitution, The Post has learned.

The state Health Department of Health has awarded $1 million in public funds combined over two years to two contractors as part of the new “sex worker health pilot program.”

Under the initiative, sex workers in New York City and western New York will be provided with primary, sexual and behavioral health care, as well as dental care.

What a strange thing to subsidize, because when you subsidize something, you get more of it. Tax something, get less of it, subsidize something, get more of it, it’s the law of economics.

Sure, there are pitiful cases in this subset of people. We all know that prostitutes are more subject to venereal diseases, drug abuse and certainly mental health problems given the demands of that lifestyle, meaning, their health care costs would be higher than average.

But New Yorkers, on average, pay some of the highest health care costs in the nation, clocking in at an average of $13,012 per person, according to Forbes, citing Forbes Advisor, and given the large numbers of indigents already getting a free ride in New York, that means anyone else is going to be paying a lot more than that based on how averages work. Illegals have just gotten a bill passed in the state Senate this past June for “free” health care, just for being here illegally. The homeless, too, have many resources for free health care. Now sex workers are about to get cut. 

But as for the ordinary working-guy New Yorker, who pays some of the highest taxes and health care costs in the nation, they get nothing, except for but more bills, and even higher health care costs as state spending balloons on carve-outs like these.

It’s pretty bizarre to be incentivizing prostittution through free health care, including even free dental care. Why should prostitutes get special treatment, as if they were a special voting bloc. Prostitution is closely linked to human trafficking, so this may be a witting or unwitting gift to human traffickers, whose “stock” of humans will be improved, and thus more profitable for their “businesses” to encourage expansion.

Critics cited by the New York Post said it appeared to be another step on the slippery slope of decriminalizing prostitution. With few people ever prosecuted for crime anymore owing to that state’s Soros district attorneys, it seems that that barn door was left open long ago.

What seems unconscionable is that productive, taxpaying citizens are still paying full fare on health care, while people engaged in extremely self-destructive acts such as prostitution of their bodies and mental health (prostitute feel nothing on the love front) for money should be given special treatment. 

If the state wants to decriminalize prostitution, fine and dandy, but let prostitutes pay full fare on health care same as other New Yorkers, with the costs of their lifestyle built in in a true equality measure. If the welder and the schoolteacher need to pay full fare on their health care by state mandate, make the prostitute pay full fare for health care, too. Better still, force convicted human traffickers to be held accountable for those unpaid health care costs and premiums of their human cargo, which of course, they are not.
Obviously, a bill like this will create more prostitution and more human trafficking as more costs are removed from those operations. That in turn will create mayhem in the cities as even more cheap hotels and apartments and other housing become late night mayhem zones as well as magnets for drug dealing, which always goes with more prostitution.
That in turn will drive more productive New Yorkers, including those trying to raise kids, out of state. They’ve already got a big problem with that in New York and New York’s far-left governor, Kathy Hochul, has already stated good riddance before backtracking and trying to bring them back. But this measure will simply bring more flight, reducing their state tax base, and congressional representation. For the rest of us, the dynamic will be clear: Subsidize the destructive, penalize the productive, and watch the normal people flee.