The severe nursing shortages in hospitals across the country has turned one of the most important jobs in the medical profession into a nightmare. Nurses at a major hospital in New Jersey fight back.
I recently retired after 41 years of nursing. I watched care devolve from patient centered to profit centered with the accompanying decrease in any job satisfaction or joy. My last few years ai spent most of my time writing appeal letters to insurance companies who denied medication and services for patients with epilepsy, migraines, multiple sclerosis, myasthenia gravis, ALS and more chronic neurological diseases. Insurance companies know that this is a great way for them to preserve their money. It was so demoralizing. I was recently hospitalized. I could have been in a torture facility. Nurses no longer give bed baths, monitor output, or listen, or have time to provide any emotional support. They also did not seem to believe in germ theory and caused me to have a UTI. They took vitals until 11pm, then at 5am, turn on the light and ask you if you need anything?!? Meals were of the lowest quality food and if they sent the wrong thing, there was no way to fix it. The first week ai was there I had missed 14 meals. I had a slow GI bleed, when I arrived my Hgb was 4.6,I had bilateral multiple PE, an aortic embolism, a volvulus stomach that was all in my chest. I received 3 blood transfusions but nothing to restore very depleted iron stores, I was sent home to continue treatment outpatient. It takes weeks to months to get into all the various MD’s. I finally got iron infusions, , the endoscopy/colonoscopy, and am finally scheduled for a paraesophageal hiatal hernia repair. This has all taken 6 months during which I have had sever weakness, fatigue, and pain with very limited physical activity. We often talk about the financial costs and the burn out of staff, the unnecessary death of patients, ut if believe we need to add the low quality of care and the emotional, psychological, physical, amd financial cost to patients. I just told one particularly bullying NP that I don’t expect bullying , just another level of pain from the people I am supposed to able to turn to for help, We need universal health care now, but until there are laws against lobbying money buying lawmakers and judges I am not sure how it will happen. I wish the Doctors and nurses would create a nationwide union. I belonged to the INA for years, we did go on strike and got better staffing for our one facility, but it is not nearly enough. Patients continue to get shafted. The US has the worse outcomes of any industrialized country and we pay twice and sometimes more for it. CEO and upper administrative staff salaries have not been like this since the Gilded Age. Income inequality has become dangerously destabilizing to democracy. I am holding on to hope that lawmakers can came a difference, ut it is a thin thread of hope.
One of my daughters is a pediatric nurse practitioner or I should say was. She still has her NP license but she's not doing patient care. She spent 5 years in a PICU (pediatric intensive care unit) in the ER of an Arizona hospital. She specialized in cardiac care. She fried out. The workload, the hours, the pressure, and the emotional strain was too much for her. Her patients were small children. She is now down in Argentina using her NP knowledge and skills answering a nurse's hot line out of the US. What Chris talks about here is why the US will fail. The evil Republicans want to make everything about the almighty dollar (which probably isn't going to be almighty all that much longer) and that will not work. A partial answer to this outrage is to bring back the 91% top marginal tax rate. Yeah, you can pay yourself obscene sums of money and the government can take it away from you. I don't like that but for all the CEOs who have 8 figure + compensation, that's what you're asking for.
We are now seeing the logical endgame of for profit medical system. And it is well documented that the non-profit hospitals play the game exactly like the for profit hospitals. Nurses, as well as doctors, are an expense. Of course there will be pressure on salaries, and of course AI and robotic replacements are coming - to reduce costs further ( and they will claim its due to staffing shortages).
On the revenue side the system is designed to maximize billing by ordering expensive tests, surgeries, treatments and medications. I heard of an ER in California where the doctors are paid 10% of what they bill for. So what incentive is there to sit with a hysterical woman ( or man) and hear her story and try to figure out what is really going on?
The problem is not only nurses -although they have the worst conditions. The majority of doctors would not encourage their son or daughter to go into medicine. Fifty percent of female doctors are taking antidepressants and physicians have a very high suicide rate. Nurses and doctors go into the profession because they want to help people and to heal. They are forced into being the marketing arm for pharmaceutical and medical device companies. And at the end of the day, they are an expense on the income statement of the hospital.
Being a medical doctor of over 50 years I highly support a one payer universal health care system and I fervently support the causes of striking nurses.
And they should strip hospital systems of their non-profit status if they are giving money to support politicians and political causes that affect healthcare legislation to their advantage against the workers.
"Almost one-third of New Jersey’s nurses have left the profession in the last three years."
What happens when vulture capitalists call the shots.. worth noting New York fired 17,000 nurses and hospital workers who refused mRNA transfections that never stopped or slowed Covid the "rapidly spreading" virus they had worked treating for 18 months prior to Warp Speed jabs.
Speaking as a nurse with almost 35 years of experience, the healthcare being provided today is often an expensive illusion. The only force that I recognize as the true check and balance toward corporate greed is the Nurse. Within a union Nurses safely call attention to unsafe demands. If they are fleeing, the general public needs to rally.
This is what the Brexit Boris conservative mob in Britain wanted/wants for Britain - as they do their best to destroy The National Health NHS system - and sell it to these same US whiteanters asnd profit-takers. Aspects of it are circling Australia, too. Thanks for this exposé, Chris H.
In comparison to most people in our country my health care would be considered very good. My health care and everyone else’s should be A+ since our system is the most expensive in the world but I would rate my care as B- or C+. I am afraid to get seriously sick, because of inadequate care I might get. Our nurses should be the best paid, with all hospital nurses being paid a minimum of $90 to $100,000 with excellent working conditions and benefits. We live in a sick country where we have enough resources for weapons which kill people but not enough resources to treat medical problems to keep our citizens alive!
I suspect that a huge reason for the loss of 1/3 of the nursing workforce was the refusal to be jabbed with an experimental gene therapy. I was a firm believer in universal health care until these jabs were mandated. Now I believe that one cannot have the government in control of people’s personal medical decisions. The mandates have shown us what they can and will do with that power. I’d rather give everyone money to spend on the healthcare that they choose.
Hedges states at the beginning of this article that RWJBarnabas Health, "which owns 12 acute care hospitals" is registered as a 501(c) (3) not-for-profit charitable organization. Then, toward the end, he quotes his interviewee, Dr. Margarete Flowers who states "We cannot work within the for-profit system to fix this problem."
So which is the solution to the problem (which is, ostensibly the likes of RWJ Barnabus Health)? End for profit or not-for-profit profit health care organizations?
Seems to me, based on responses to my question regarding 501(c)(3) organizations, that they should be outlawed. Like religious organizations, they appear to be a tax loophole that has been greatly abused. From my research of a number of local 501(c)(3)'s in my area, most high level executives of these organizations are paid handsomely...and are closely tied into funding from government at all levels. They also appear tied into church organizations that are actually engaged in everyday business services (i.e.child care and education), that do not pay taxes due to religious designation. This includes not paying property taxes that most property owners contribute toward maintaining the cost of civilized society. I believe this has led to the advent of a myriad of "mega churches" that operate on a significant area of valuable land and zoning laws have been bent to their will due to legal threat of religious discrimination. 501 (c) (3) appear to have take a page from the church's playbook in terms of "charitable" semantics to the extent that they have become socially "untouchable" in terms of being held socially accountable for paying the same tax burden everyone else operates under. They also appear to be a favorite spot of local politicians to funnel money for politically oriented initiatives like free health care for the "disadvantaged" (meaning the ones who will vote for them) and "affordable housing" (meaning subsidizing government employees who would otherwise not be able to afford to live in their district due to high taxes. Its appears 501 (c) (3) has become one big circle jerk. In my opinion, overhaul of this tax designations needs to be addressed just as urgently as possible universal health care legislation.
I recently retired after 41 years of nursing. I watched care devolve from patient centered to profit centered with the accompanying decrease in any job satisfaction or joy. My last few years ai spent most of my time writing appeal letters to insurance companies who denied medication and services for patients with epilepsy, migraines, multiple sclerosis, myasthenia gravis, ALS and more chronic neurological diseases. Insurance companies know that this is a great way for them to preserve their money. It was so demoralizing. I was recently hospitalized. I could have been in a torture facility. Nurses no longer give bed baths, monitor output, or listen, or have time to provide any emotional support. They also did not seem to believe in germ theory and caused me to have a UTI. They took vitals until 11pm, then at 5am, turn on the light and ask you if you need anything?!? Meals were of the lowest quality food and if they sent the wrong thing, there was no way to fix it. The first week ai was there I had missed 14 meals. I had a slow GI bleed, when I arrived my Hgb was 4.6,I had bilateral multiple PE, an aortic embolism, a volvulus stomach that was all in my chest. I received 3 blood transfusions but nothing to restore very depleted iron stores, I was sent home to continue treatment outpatient. It takes weeks to months to get into all the various MD’s. I finally got iron infusions, , the endoscopy/colonoscopy, and am finally scheduled for a paraesophageal hiatal hernia repair. This has all taken 6 months during which I have had sever weakness, fatigue, and pain with very limited physical activity. We often talk about the financial costs and the burn out of staff, the unnecessary death of patients, ut if believe we need to add the low quality of care and the emotional, psychological, physical, amd financial cost to patients. I just told one particularly bullying NP that I don’t expect bullying , just another level of pain from the people I am supposed to able to turn to for help, We need universal health care now, but until there are laws against lobbying money buying lawmakers and judges I am not sure how it will happen. I wish the Doctors and nurses would create a nationwide union. I belonged to the INA for years, we did go on strike and got better staffing for our one facility, but it is not nearly enough. Patients continue to get shafted. The US has the worse outcomes of any industrialized country and we pay twice and sometimes more for it. CEO and upper administrative staff salaries have not been like this since the Gilded Age. Income inequality has become dangerously destabilizing to democracy. I am holding on to hope that lawmakers can came a difference, ut it is a thin thread of hope.
One of my daughters is a pediatric nurse practitioner or I should say was. She still has her NP license but she's not doing patient care. She spent 5 years in a PICU (pediatric intensive care unit) in the ER of an Arizona hospital. She specialized in cardiac care. She fried out. The workload, the hours, the pressure, and the emotional strain was too much for her. Her patients were small children. She is now down in Argentina using her NP knowledge and skills answering a nurse's hot line out of the US. What Chris talks about here is why the US will fail. The evil Republicans want to make everything about the almighty dollar (which probably isn't going to be almighty all that much longer) and that will not work. A partial answer to this outrage is to bring back the 91% top marginal tax rate. Yeah, you can pay yourself obscene sums of money and the government can take it away from you. I don't like that but for all the CEOs who have 8 figure + compensation, that's what you're asking for.
We are now seeing the logical endgame of for profit medical system. And it is well documented that the non-profit hospitals play the game exactly like the for profit hospitals. Nurses, as well as doctors, are an expense. Of course there will be pressure on salaries, and of course AI and robotic replacements are coming - to reduce costs further ( and they will claim its due to staffing shortages).
On the revenue side the system is designed to maximize billing by ordering expensive tests, surgeries, treatments and medications. I heard of an ER in California where the doctors are paid 10% of what they bill for. So what incentive is there to sit with a hysterical woman ( or man) and hear her story and try to figure out what is really going on?
The problem is not only nurses -although they have the worst conditions. The majority of doctors would not encourage their son or daughter to go into medicine. Fifty percent of female doctors are taking antidepressants and physicians have a very high suicide rate. Nurses and doctors go into the profession because they want to help people and to heal. They are forced into being the marketing arm for pharmaceutical and medical device companies. And at the end of the day, they are an expense on the income statement of the hospital.
Being a medical doctor of over 50 years I highly support a one payer universal health care system and I fervently support the causes of striking nurses.
And they should strip hospital systems of their non-profit status if they are giving money to support politicians and political causes that affect healthcare legislation to their advantage against the workers.
"Almost one-third of New Jersey’s nurses have left the profession in the last three years."
What happens when vulture capitalists call the shots.. worth noting New York fired 17,000 nurses and hospital workers who refused mRNA transfections that never stopped or slowed Covid the "rapidly spreading" virus they had worked treating for 18 months prior to Warp Speed jabs.
This is HORRIFIC. It is TRAGIC. It just makes me want to cry! What is America / the World coming to?! God Save Us!!!
"Travelers"?
Cal them what they are: scabs.
Speaking as a nurse with almost 35 years of experience, the healthcare being provided today is often an expensive illusion. The only force that I recognize as the true check and balance toward corporate greed is the Nurse. Within a union Nurses safely call attention to unsafe demands. If they are fleeing, the general public needs to rally.
Anybody else feel like they (the ruling elites) are literally trying to rob us then kill us intentionally?
This is what the Brexit Boris conservative mob in Britain wanted/wants for Britain - as they do their best to destroy The National Health NHS system - and sell it to these same US whiteanters asnd profit-takers. Aspects of it are circling Australia, too. Thanks for this exposé, Chris H.
In comparison to most people in our country my health care would be considered very good. My health care and everyone else’s should be A+ since our system is the most expensive in the world but I would rate my care as B- or C+. I am afraid to get seriously sick, because of inadequate care I might get. Our nurses should be the best paid, with all hospital nurses being paid a minimum of $90 to $100,000 with excellent working conditions and benefits. We live in a sick country where we have enough resources for weapons which kill people but not enough resources to treat medical problems to keep our citizens alive!
I suspect that a huge reason for the loss of 1/3 of the nursing workforce was the refusal to be jabbed with an experimental gene therapy. I was a firm believer in universal health care until these jabs were mandated. Now I believe that one cannot have the government in control of people’s personal medical decisions. The mandates have shown us what they can and will do with that power. I’d rather give everyone money to spend on the healthcare that they choose.
Hedges states at the beginning of this article that RWJBarnabas Health, "which owns 12 acute care hospitals" is registered as a 501(c) (3) not-for-profit charitable organization. Then, toward the end, he quotes his interviewee, Dr. Margarete Flowers who states "We cannot work within the for-profit system to fix this problem."
So which is the solution to the problem (which is, ostensibly the likes of RWJ Barnabus Health)? End for profit or not-for-profit profit health care organizations?
Liberal America needs to take a break from thier trump obsession.
Seems to me, based on responses to my question regarding 501(c)(3) organizations, that they should be outlawed. Like religious organizations, they appear to be a tax loophole that has been greatly abused. From my research of a number of local 501(c)(3)'s in my area, most high level executives of these organizations are paid handsomely...and are closely tied into funding from government at all levels. They also appear tied into church organizations that are actually engaged in everyday business services (i.e.child care and education), that do not pay taxes due to religious designation. This includes not paying property taxes that most property owners contribute toward maintaining the cost of civilized society. I believe this has led to the advent of a myriad of "mega churches" that operate on a significant area of valuable land and zoning laws have been bent to their will due to legal threat of religious discrimination. 501 (c) (3) appear to have take a page from the church's playbook in terms of "charitable" semantics to the extent that they have become socially "untouchable" in terms of being held socially accountable for paying the same tax burden everyone else operates under. They also appear to be a favorite spot of local politicians to funnel money for politically oriented initiatives like free health care for the "disadvantaged" (meaning the ones who will vote for them) and "affordable housing" (meaning subsidizing government employees who would otherwise not be able to afford to live in their district due to high taxes. Its appears 501 (c) (3) has become one big circle jerk. In my opinion, overhaul of this tax designations needs to be addressed just as urgently as possible universal health care legislation.
Brilliant piece. Shameful reality.