On Friday, The Washington Free Beacon posted an article about one aspect of New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s affordability agenda.
The article reports:
The “affordability” agenda of New York City’s new mayor apparently includes nurses getting paid more than $200,000 a year.
Mamdani showed up this week at an event to support striking members of the New York State Nurses Association, who are participating in what the union characterizes as “the largest nurse strike” in the history of New York City. The union says nearly 15,000 nurses have gone out at Mount Sinai, NewYork-Presbyterian, and Montefiore hospitals. Socialist Sen. Bernie Sanders (I., Vt.), a frequent Mamdani wingman, also turned up; the Associated Press quoted Sanders as saying, “The people of this country are sick and tired of the greed in this health care industry.”
This is what happens when you elect someone with no business experience or knowledge of economics. The greed in the health care industry is not going to be helped by paying nurses $200,000 a year. In fact, paying nurses $200,000 a year is only going to make healthcare more expensive. If you want to bring down the cost of healthcare, the first think you need to do is get the government out of it. Other than licensing hospitals and health care workers, they need to stay away. It has been government subsides to health insurance companies and frivolous lawsuits that have caused to price of healthcare and health insurance to skyrocket.
According to health system tracker:
Since 2000, the price of medical care, including services provided as well as insurance, drugs, and medical equipment, has increased by 121.3%. In contrast, prices for all consumer goods and services rose by 86.1% in the same period.
The article at The Washington Free Beacon concludes:
One irony is that if the nurses get what they are asking for, they eventually may qualify as “rich” for the purposes of New York taxing them to oblivion. The New York City top marginal income tax rate of 3.876 percent kicks in for married-filing-jointly filers at $90,000, and the New York State individual income tax rate for single filers in 2025 has an increase at the $215,400 a year mark to 6.85% from 6 percent. As Hammond drily observed, eventually nurses, or two-nurse households, might find themselves hit by New York’s millionaires tax. That is, if they don’t join some of the hospital trustees and decamp to lower-tax, lower-health-care-cost destinations, such as Florida.
New York City is going to have an interesting year.