A friend of the blog writes in re a piece on the ongoing Allina nurses strike:
[Saint Paul City Councilman] Chris Tolbert said, “If a nurse in the health care industry can’t get quality health care from a health care company, we’re all in trouble.”
Well, that is what we Republicans said when the ACA was first signed into law.
History has such an ineluctable symmetry, sometimes….
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While I was tailgating at the game on Sunday, several of the nurses were walking among us handing out stickers for supporting them.
My friend and I had the opportunity to rebut them. We told them that the medical profession and their left wing supporting unions, pushed for Obamacare. Now that it was biting them in their asses, they didn’t like it, so they made their own beds; now they can lie in them They tried to protest that it was not about that, but when we busted out laughing at them, they took off in a huff.
The nurses’ union seems to be trying to create a narrative that this about safety by highlight examples of having to deal with a violent patient in the ER and claiming that the training that is being provided by Allina is inadequate for both their protection and the protection of the other patients. I believe that they are demanding that their employer provide security guards in the ER as well. With the way that the federal government is pushing to make further cuts to providers, that’s going to be a tough sell.
As far as the health insurance issue, I tend not to be sympathetic when people who supported ObamaCare as their union did are now facing premium increases and benefit cuts like the rest of us. I’m not alone in that regard which is probably why they’re running ads trying to convince the public that they’re really doing this “for the patients.”
I was in Abbott Northwestern Hospital during the nurses strike; it did NOT btw include all nurses, so my care particularly for surgery prep, involved both the nurses brought in from the deep south to replace the nurses striking as well as nurses who were not on strike.
Naturally I did my due dilligent research while a captive audience to the strike.
The striking nurses are perfectly happy to pay higher health care premiums for the better care. Also they want ONLY the same health care package that comparable nursing staff have at all the other metro hospitals. Those in the medical profession have a higher exposure to contagious diseases, and other risks, than the rest of us, and I can appreciate for that reason why they want the higher level of insurance coverage. Anyone remember the Ebola hysteria, (and how successfully Obama dealt with it) – including the poor quality of hospital isolation protection in Texas where a hospital tried to get by on the cheap, exposing their staff to Ebola?
Stupid conservatives gutted Ebola research to underfund Zika response. BAD choice to try to get by on the cheap; THAT will bite us all in the ass.
Without broad insurance coverage and the resulting access to health care, there is a much larger problem with epidemics of all kinds, from Ebola to Zika to Dengue, to MERS, avian flu, and a host of others. Having a large uninsured population puts everyone at greater risk, with the front line risk being health care providers. Remember how many millions now receive health care making YOU lot safer too next time you bitch about the ACA.
Most of all, and this was important, they want to push back against a higher case load per nurse, as a safety issue, not just security guards. At least while I was there, on two different occasions during the last nursing strike, one as an emergency admit by ambulance, there was quite a lot of security present in the ER and elsewhere, and this did not seem to have been greatly increased in response to the strike. It was the usual presence.
What they are resisting in terms of security is lower levels, not increased levels, from what I was told. I think their concerns were more than justified, given the size of the location and the volume and variety of people they serve.
I received the “sponsored content” posts of the Minnesota Nurses Association now on Facebook. Reading their postings, and then the comments……lets just say these aren’t your friend’s mother who was a nurse at the local hospital. Its just another leftwing political organization. Today they are going off on General Mills and organizing a protest of GM shareholder meeting (kind of ironic since GM CEO is a leftist Democrat). The comments…..go on and on about how bad the corporations are and how bad profits are. And a few conspiracy theories.
DG,
Your observations are duly noted. (And in the case of the crack about the “stalling” of funding for Zika and Ebola, pointed out as selective reading; the Democrats have played plenty of politics with both too).
I should point out that the friend of this blog who sent the email is, in fact, a nurse. An actual nurse – not like the “Nurse” neighbor who’ll no doubt make an appearance shortly, confirming your every statement but unavailable for cross-examination.
My mother worked at the Allina hospital at Lake and Chicago the last time the nurses were talking about striking. Those in her department weren’t hired as nurses and hence weren’t part of the MNA or any strike. They were putting together plans to carpool in together, probably with my dad or I driving and acting as their personal security. Lots of hospital employees were worried about crossing the picket line despite not being nurses.
A left-leaning friend of mine, writing about the nurse’s strike on Facebook, asked “What happened to the days when people *respected* teachers, nurses and police?”
I couldn’t quite bring myself to respond “most of us do. It’s their unions we don’t much care for”.
Not even the idea of unions qua unions either; government employee unions that serve as money-laundering operations for Big Left.
Employers will have to pay a penalty tax for giving their employees “Cadillac” health plans. Add that to the cost of actually providing the health plan and the employees get very expensive.
Conflating insurance and health care is always a bad idea.
Everything MNA puts out says this is about health insurance. But, yes, the union also wants security to be part of the *nurse’s* contract, which Allina says it cannot do, since security officers have their own contracts with Allina. Doesn’t mean they cannot put officers in the ER, just cannot make it part of the MNA contract.
The union is doing its best to politicize and rally support. But, plenty of nurses are not happy with the union on this and most reports are saying 10% have already crossed the picket line. I empathize with them most because, if their identities are revealed to the union, they face a lot of bullying. I also know of several who found jobs elsewhere rather than deal with the union anymore.
If indeed all other nurses have this coverage, as DG alleges, and one provider is cutting that, we would assume that Allina will lose all their best nurses to competitors. With or without a union, it will be a self-punishing move. On the flip side, if the cuts are necessary to preserve fiscal solvency, then we would assume that refusing to take these cuts would end up with a lot more nursers getting the true minimum wage of zero.
Economics is nasty that way, DG. And that great Obama response to Ebola? Yeah, right. Those 2800 troops did not treat a single patient, let alone save a life. If you want a good example of what to do, look up what Firestone did in Liberia. Even the Cubans figured out they needed to send doctors instead of soldiers.
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