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.
Thank you for your service. It's weird that people say that to veterans but not to nurses and doctors and teachers and farmers and all the millions of people who enrich and sustain us in a million different ways.
Yes. Part of the propaganda system in the US is to mis-characterize what the military (and what amounts to it's "workers") actually does. Nurses, teachers, doctors, trades-people in general, etc. Actually provide useful and even vital services to the country and their fellow citizens. The military is about force-projection and obtaining criminal profiteering for war contractors and other useless and dangerous actors. This is not to say the soldiers who "serve" are bad; they're often employed by the military in what amounts to coerced employment, there being no other good ways to make a living here. But military enrollment is way down, happily. That is why some Congress freaks want to bring back the draft. Too many working-class youth have decided that the military does not measure up, at all. It's kind of obvious at this point.
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.
Frank, was I implying too much that with your response "republicans did it all, with the laughing emoji" ....that you meant that both parties are bought and paid for by the healthcare/pharma donors? That is my sincere belief.
There is an old DC political establishment that is connected to the ruling managerial class. The Democrat party is their space. However, there are old GOP politicians that are just the same in a different suit. But the new GOP isn't that. The new GOP is anti-establishment. The majority of voters should be anti-establishment too, but for their media feed brainwashing.
Republicans have not done anything to hurt the nursing profession. There is a general Republican ethos that is anti-union. Even the new GOPers hold that view. It isn't because they dislike workers as Chris might say or imply, it is because they think a free market where workers negotiate individually with their employers is a better model to support both workers, and the economy that employs them. Unions formed for safety reasons primarily. Today there are so many worker safety regulations and laws, and so many other regulations and laws to protect employees, that unions are no longer needed. They are bonehead extortion and a political wedge for the left.
I run companies that employee 100s. If I responded to what my employees felt they deserved, the companies would become financially insolvent, fail and the employees would lose their jobs. Labor does not know enough nor have enough of a vested interest in the success of the business to collectively bargain. I support ESOPs. If the employees want to tell the company what they should be paid, etc., then the employees should organize to buy the company so they have skin in the game if their demands make it fail.
Name me a GOP politician who is "anti-Establishment." The fact that they're in the GOP means they're Establishment. So, the best way for employees to get what they need is to forego unions and representation and bargain individually? Really? Unions formed for "safety reasons primarily?" That's an utter falsehood, and the idea that a worker can negotiate as an individual and get anything other than a boot in the ass is an ongoing libertarian fantasy. That's the model in Ukraine now--a neoliberal paradise in which workers have no rights, and one of the first things we (the US) saw to was the destruction of their working class, which is ongoing.
You employ hundreds, eh? You got one thing right--workers need to organize at your business, create a worker-controlled union, buy out the company, and throw you out. I remember you; you come around here with these preposterous and ill-considered ideas and right-wing libertarian/totalitarian anti-historical fantasies to support your crackpot notions.
I agree with Frank Lee,.....it is a bipartisan medicine show. Both parties are complicit in selling the public ineffectual colored water in high priced medicine bottles.
You apparently didn't read his entire screed. I forced myself to. Read it. He's a right-wing troll who comes around here with some truly awful musings filled with lies and errors.
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.
Just asked a friend who is a nursing supervisor about the salary of nurses, and she said the starting salary in NY for a nurse is 90 thousand. Not exactly something to be upset about. What is disturbing is the corporate world taking over the medical field and buying up doctor's practices where they are not given a free hand, which can and does too often affect the well being of their patients.
I certainly have, and have lived my whole life in NYC. I have a three year nursing degree, but not something I pursued as a career. However at this stage of my life I have been there for family and friends in that capacity and even cared for a brother who died of AIDS over a period of a year, and I really needed to be there, since nurses seem to have been in hiding in those days as were aids, as was the rest of the medical staff. Basically I worked and continue to work in teaching, where it takes more degrees and years to reach top salary and it's not 90 thousand. My background is in the biological sciences, and yes I teach my classes about climate change and nature. Also I have worked as a clinical counselor, since I have a degree in that area as well. So you have my whole academic history, which has been oriented toward helping people. So, in your opinion is that enough of an academic background for me to express my opinion and disagree with your guru? From the tenor of your response, perhaps as a woman, no matter how educated I don't have that right. Is that what you are saying Arrowhead?
Nurses are fetching over $100,000 a year for RN’s. What’s the problem making you cry. This time? Your religion of false compassion is wearing thin on Americans who take responsibility for their own lives.
Yes indeed, who is that? A person who imagines in 2023 and massive inflationary pressures that a hundred grand a year (is that before or after taxes?) is a king's ransom, and launches a semi-literate response to this outrage. Take note of the old canard about "taking responsibility" for one's life. Huh? Is not our over-paid RN (a hundred grand a year! Every year! ) taking responsibility for her life? How could it be otherwise, one wonders? Notice how he presumes to speak for "Americans" (a very large group indeed), and then presumes there's "false compassion" (for who?) being bandied about that must stop, because it's "wearing thin." Our troll here has an audience of exactly one, but imagines millions.
I should add though that it is the principle - long used by those who want to control the rest of of us - of divide and conquer - who organise and pay and use the police or other thugs to support these scabs - who are just other poor schmucks used as pawns in this ugly power play. Poet/writer/playwright and former Poet Laureate of Colorado - now resident in southern Tasmania - David Mason wrote a verse-novel Ludlow - published in 2007 (Red Hen Press which was described as follows by B.H.Fairchild: "A true verse novel (real verse, real novel). David Mason's "Ludlow" revisits one of the cruelest, bloodiest chapters in the history of American labor and state and corporate injustice: the Ludlow coal field massacre of 1914, in which eighteen men, women, and children of coal mining families were killed by the Colorado National Guard. Within a driving narrative that never loses momentum, Mason's deftly drawn characters, both historical and fictional, take on the lineaments of Dorothea Lange's photographs. With "Ludlow", reminiscent in its political and dramatic power of Steinbeck's In Dubious Battle, Mason confirms his reputation as one of America's finest poets and a master of narrative." So, yes, I agree with the term "scabs" but who has driven men/women to be so desperate that they are prepared to traduce their own industry fellows - this is where we need to most look for the culprits of industrial unrest.
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.
Spot on. I also believe the phenomena DJ mentions applies to folks who would have sought (or extended) a career in the U.S. military as well. In fact, it applies to public police and teachers as well. They are dropping out of all systems like flies. This is why recruiting efforts and obscene bonuses and perks are being applied to those professions in order to try and plug the losses. That additional effort, effectively, goes in the red column of net federal operating debt--which total nearly $33T at this point AND costs the U.S. taxpayer nearly $1.8B a day in interest payments in order to carry.
I would venture to say that the "the jab" mandate that the Biden administration attempted to apply on the American working class (before the Supreme Court stepped in to formally make it illegal) set back our economy and labor force equilibrium to the same measure that George W. Bush's illegal invasion of Iraq (on March 19, 2003) set back global diplomacy and international relations .
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?
The whole miserable pile of garbage gets swept into the dustbin of history. A NATIONAL HEALTH SERVICE. All health care providers paid by the government. No more corporations, no more private equity, no more insurance. The pharmaceutical corporations taken over, their ill gotten ‘intellectual property’ seized for the benefit of all human persons. That is what is needed. The paucity of imagination that it takes to think that the only alternative to for-profit corporations is non-profit corporations!
Sounds good (superficially)--but involves so many important questions that make such statements implausible.
As for your mention of paucity; How do you, Andrew, wrap your big mind around a U.S. National Health Service (NHS) being paid for by the federal government that is now nearly $33T in net operating debt-- without (NHS) expenses? How much do you believe it would cost the U.S. taxpayer, annually, to provide this service? What category of expense do you see being cut to make room for such an expense? The only plausible answer I could see that may have the capacity to cover NHS costs is Congress voting to drastically cut our defense pending category which amounts to nearly $1 trillion a year (if you include black ops), or 20-25% of our budget depending on how you calculate budget deficit spending. Regardless, our defense spending is more than the military budgets of the next 9 foreign countries combined. so, no doubt, there is certainly room to cut on defense. But why would Congress vote to cut defense spending which goes towards the military industrial complex who recycles s a good bit back into their districts in the form of fed. gov. spending on equipment, ammunition, R&D expenses,--and undocumented kick backs? If you claim there would be no corporations, private equity or insurance companies involved with National Health Care spending, then where is the incentive for Congress to allocate this money towards NHC? Do you think they would all have a watershed change of consciousness towards actually choosing to serve the American people they represent--rather than special interest that puts money in politician's pockets? When has that ever happened?
BTW, our defense spending vs. GDP has been slowly falling since WWII when it was nearly 40% !!! Rand Paul asked recently "Where is the Afghan war peace dividend?" Well, if he looked at the Defense spending vs. GDP historical chart (usgovernmentspending.com/vid05) he'd see it.
An entity registered as a "not-for-profit charitable organisation" is not necessarily not-for-profit, charitable, or even an actual organisation. Use some common sense: what is in a term like that? How often are they really accurate?
It's the legal/tax equivalent of the way names are misleading, like how the US War Department and Secretary of War were renamed respectively to the Department of Defense and the Secretary of Defense without their purpose being any different. Same idea really.
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.
Thank you for your service. It's weird that people say that to veterans but not to nurses and doctors and teachers and farmers and all the millions of people who enrich and sustain us in a million different ways.
Yes. Part of the propaganda system in the US is to mis-characterize what the military (and what amounts to it's "workers") actually does. Nurses, teachers, doctors, trades-people in general, etc. Actually provide useful and even vital services to the country and their fellow citizens. The military is about force-projection and obtaining criminal profiteering for war contractors and other useless and dangerous actors. This is not to say the soldiers who "serve" are bad; they're often employed by the military in what amounts to coerced employment, there being no other good ways to make a living here. But military enrollment is way down, happily. That is why some Congress freaks want to bring back the draft. Too many working-class youth have decided that the military does not measure up, at all. It's kind of obvious at this point.
Nice post, but please give up the hopeless hope for "lawmakers" doing the right thing.
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.
Capitalists are Capitalists whether they are “Republicans” or “Democrats” is irrelevant. Greed knows no “party”!
Yeah. Those evil Republicans did it all. 🤣
Frank, was I implying too much that with your response "republicans did it all, with the laughing emoji" ....that you meant that both parties are bought and paid for by the healthcare/pharma donors? That is my sincere belief.
There is an old DC political establishment that is connected to the ruling managerial class. The Democrat party is their space. However, there are old GOP politicians that are just the same in a different suit. But the new GOP isn't that. The new GOP is anti-establishment. The majority of voters should be anti-establishment too, but for their media feed brainwashing.
Republicans have not done anything to hurt the nursing profession. There is a general Republican ethos that is anti-union. Even the new GOPers hold that view. It isn't because they dislike workers as Chris might say or imply, it is because they think a free market where workers negotiate individually with their employers is a better model to support both workers, and the economy that employs them. Unions formed for safety reasons primarily. Today there are so many worker safety regulations and laws, and so many other regulations and laws to protect employees, that unions are no longer needed. They are bonehead extortion and a political wedge for the left.
I run companies that employee 100s. If I responded to what my employees felt they deserved, the companies would become financially insolvent, fail and the employees would lose their jobs. Labor does not know enough nor have enough of a vested interest in the success of the business to collectively bargain. I support ESOPs. If the employees want to tell the company what they should be paid, etc., then the employees should organize to buy the company so they have skin in the game if their demands make it fail.
Name me a GOP politician who is "anti-Establishment." The fact that they're in the GOP means they're Establishment. So, the best way for employees to get what they need is to forego unions and representation and bargain individually? Really? Unions formed for "safety reasons primarily?" That's an utter falsehood, and the idea that a worker can negotiate as an individual and get anything other than a boot in the ass is an ongoing libertarian fantasy. That's the model in Ukraine now--a neoliberal paradise in which workers have no rights, and one of the first things we (the US) saw to was the destruction of their working class, which is ongoing.
You employ hundreds, eh? You got one thing right--workers need to organize at your business, create a worker-controlled union, buy out the company, and throw you out. I remember you; you come around here with these preposterous and ill-considered ideas and right-wing libertarian/totalitarian anti-historical fantasies to support your crackpot notions.
And you clearly never worked front line healthcare. The free market fantasy zombies strike again.
Exhibit A of a socioeconomic malcontent typing his screed on a marvelous machine created by the system he hates.
Without all those advances of the free market you would just be seething in your room by yourself.
I get it... you need workers to be victims to prop up your Marxist worldview. It is the Shirkley Principle.
keep livin the dream buddy
I agree with Frank Lee,.....it is a bipartisan medicine show. Both parties are complicit in selling the public ineffectual colored water in high priced medicine bottles.
You apparently didn't read his entire screed. I forced myself to. Read it. He's a right-wing troll who comes around here with some truly awful musings filled with lies and errors.
are you a liberal?
What'a a liberal?
kinda like porn ya know? lol
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.
I agree. Family docs are getting killed. Doctors want to be specialists. Find a good PA who is in it for the right reasons.
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.
Wow, somebody who actually read the article and has expert experience to share! Thank you.
That's right.
"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!!!
Just asked a friend who is a nursing supervisor about the salary of nurses, and she said the starting salary in NY for a nurse is 90 thousand. Not exactly something to be upset about. What is disturbing is the corporate world taking over the medical field and buying up doctor's practices where they are not given a free hand, which can and does too often affect the well being of their patients.
Have you ever worked in healthcare? Have you ever worked in NYC? You seem to always find the time to trash every article Mr. Hedges writes.
I certainly have, and have lived my whole life in NYC. I have a three year nursing degree, but not something I pursued as a career. However at this stage of my life I have been there for family and friends in that capacity and even cared for a brother who died of AIDS over a period of a year, and I really needed to be there, since nurses seem to have been in hiding in those days as were aids, as was the rest of the medical staff. Basically I worked and continue to work in teaching, where it takes more degrees and years to reach top salary and it's not 90 thousand. My background is in the biological sciences, and yes I teach my classes about climate change and nature. Also I have worked as a clinical counselor, since I have a degree in that area as well. So you have my whole academic history, which has been oriented toward helping people. So, in your opinion is that enough of an academic background for me to express my opinion and disagree with your guru? From the tenor of your response, perhaps as a woman, no matter how educated I don't have that right. Is that what you are saying Arrowhead?
3 years, wow ,your and expert. I realize this stuff goes on forever w you. Its not the system, its those greedy nurses and teachers.
God's of no use here. It's going to take His Children to organize and fight for what's right. He will watch, approvingly I'm sure.
Nurses are fetching over $100,000 a year for RN’s. What’s the problem making you cry. This time? Your religion of false compassion is wearing thin on Americans who take responsibility for their own lives.
You better hope you never get too ill.
Yes indeed, who is that? A person who imagines in 2023 and massive inflationary pressures that a hundred grand a year (is that before or after taxes?) is a king's ransom, and launches a semi-literate response to this outrage. Take note of the old canard about "taking responsibility" for one's life. Huh? Is not our over-paid RN (a hundred grand a year! Every year! ) taking responsibility for her life? How could it be otherwise, one wonders? Notice how he presumes to speak for "Americans" (a very large group indeed), and then presumes there's "false compassion" (for who?) being bandied about that must stop, because it's "wearing thin." Our troll here has an audience of exactly one, but imagines millions.
Whatever
"Travelers"?
Cal them what they are: scabs.
This is the word we use in Australia, too, to describe those who are paid to break strikes! Scabs.
I should add though that it is the principle - long used by those who want to control the rest of of us - of divide and conquer - who organise and pay and use the police or other thugs to support these scabs - who are just other poor schmucks used as pawns in this ugly power play. Poet/writer/playwright and former Poet Laureate of Colorado - now resident in southern Tasmania - David Mason wrote a verse-novel Ludlow - published in 2007 (Red Hen Press which was described as follows by B.H.Fairchild: "A true verse novel (real verse, real novel). David Mason's "Ludlow" revisits one of the cruelest, bloodiest chapters in the history of American labor and state and corporate injustice: the Ludlow coal field massacre of 1914, in which eighteen men, women, and children of coal mining families were killed by the Colorado National Guard. Within a driving narrative that never loses momentum, Mason's deftly drawn characters, both historical and fictional, take on the lineaments of Dorothea Lange's photographs. With "Ludlow", reminiscent in its political and dramatic power of Steinbeck's In Dubious Battle, Mason confirms his reputation as one of America's finest poets and a master of narrative." So, yes, I agree with the term "scabs" but who has driven men/women to be so desperate that they are prepared to traduce their own industry fellows - this is where we need to most look for the culprits of industrial unrest.
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.
Spot on. I also believe the phenomena DJ mentions applies to folks who would have sought (or extended) a career in the U.S. military as well. In fact, it applies to public police and teachers as well. They are dropping out of all systems like flies. This is why recruiting efforts and obscene bonuses and perks are being applied to those professions in order to try and plug the losses. That additional effort, effectively, goes in the red column of net federal operating debt--which total nearly $33T at this point AND costs the U.S. taxpayer nearly $1.8B a day in interest payments in order to carry.
I would venture to say that the "the jab" mandate that the Biden administration attempted to apply on the American working class (before the Supreme Court stepped in to formally make it illegal) set back our economy and labor force equilibrium to the same measure that George W. Bush's illegal invasion of Iraq (on March 19, 2003) set back global diplomacy and international relations .
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?
“Not for profits” are just cover for paying high salaries to the top people. They pay them more and more to make sure they stay “nonprofit”
The whole miserable pile of garbage gets swept into the dustbin of history. A NATIONAL HEALTH SERVICE. All health care providers paid by the government. No more corporations, no more private equity, no more insurance. The pharmaceutical corporations taken over, their ill gotten ‘intellectual property’ seized for the benefit of all human persons. That is what is needed. The paucity of imagination that it takes to think that the only alternative to for-profit corporations is non-profit corporations!
Sounds good (superficially)--but involves so many important questions that make such statements implausible.
As for your mention of paucity; How do you, Andrew, wrap your big mind around a U.S. National Health Service (NHS) being paid for by the federal government that is now nearly $33T in net operating debt-- without (NHS) expenses? How much do you believe it would cost the U.S. taxpayer, annually, to provide this service? What category of expense do you see being cut to make room for such an expense? The only plausible answer I could see that may have the capacity to cover NHS costs is Congress voting to drastically cut our defense pending category which amounts to nearly $1 trillion a year (if you include black ops), or 20-25% of our budget depending on how you calculate budget deficit spending. Regardless, our defense spending is more than the military budgets of the next 9 foreign countries combined. so, no doubt, there is certainly room to cut on defense. But why would Congress vote to cut defense spending which goes towards the military industrial complex who recycles s a good bit back into their districts in the form of fed. gov. spending on equipment, ammunition, R&D expenses,--and undocumented kick backs? If you claim there would be no corporations, private equity or insurance companies involved with National Health Care spending, then where is the incentive for Congress to allocate this money towards NHC? Do you think they would all have a watershed change of consciousness towards actually choosing to serve the American people they represent--rather than special interest that puts money in politician's pockets? When has that ever happened?
BTW, our defense spending vs. GDP has been slowly falling since WWII when it was nearly 40% !!! Rand Paul asked recently "Where is the Afghan war peace dividend?" Well, if he looked at the Defense spending vs. GDP historical chart (usgovernmentspending.com/vid05) he'd see it.
An entity registered as a "not-for-profit charitable organisation" is not necessarily not-for-profit, charitable, or even an actual organisation. Use some common sense: what is in a term like that? How often are they really accurate?
It's the legal/tax equivalent of the way names are misleading, like how the US War Department and Secretary of War were renamed respectively to the Department of Defense and the Secretary of Defense without their purpose being any different. Same idea really.
Liberal America needs to take a break from thier trump obsession.
Who is talking about Trump?
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.