On Friday August 30th, Olympia’s newspaper The Olympian (serving the South Sound region of Washington state) published an update on the labor negotiations between the unionized nurses at Providence St. Peter hospital and their corporate overlords - Providence St. Joseph Health (PSJH). https://www.theolympian.com/news/local/article234485782.html
I am proud to be a union-represented nurse at the aforementioned Providence St. Peter. This hospital has delivered excellent care to our community since 1887. However, the unrelenting pressure to feed the middlemen (the insurance companies and now the “investors”) has morphed St. Peter from a community-based hospital to a cog in the behemoth machinery of Providence St. Joseph Health (PSJH). Since 2016 (the business marriage between the two saints) St. Peter must do what St. Joseph tells him to do. St. Joseph has told St. Peter to shortchange the nurses and outsource the accounting services to India.
This is the first contract the St. Peter nurses (represented by their local Union UFCW 141) have negotiated with PSJH since being consumed by the giant (51 hospitals, 800 clinics) corporate maw. At the exact same time that PSJH is arguing to reduce sick leave benefits for their nurses, they have laid off hundreds of office employees in Washington and Oregon, outsourcing the accounting to “our partners” in India. Meanwhile, my local St. Peter hospital “partner” is without work as of August 23rd, and my tax dollars are sent to ESL workers in India trying to cope with the ridiculously complicated and punitive insurance system imposed upon us by the GOP.
Outsourcing equals unemployment which equals uninsured which PSJH already can’t afford to handle … so they HAVE TO lay off those accountants to be able to deliver charity care to them later on. They can’t outsource nursing care (yet), but they HAVE TO extract more labor for less money and introduce practices that incentivize caregivers to come to work when ill. This is the irrational business model forced onto our local hospitals by the Republican refusal to consider an appropriate single payer system.
Let’s be honest. Our system of private insurances does not facilitate the delivery of healthcare in any way. Insurance is an inefficient, expensive and complicated billing scheme designed to enrich some people by denying reimbursements to ill and vulnerable people and then entangling their victims in endless morbid bickering at their weakest moments. This is no way to do business.
Think of the hospital as a grocery store. Ten customers are in line at the checkout, each of them hoping to leave with identical packages of frozen peas. Each client is charged a different amount for the same bag of peas, each will pay a different amount at the register, each insurance company will reimburse different amounts (or nothing) to the store, some clients will be reimbursed by the insurance company or the store in the future, and most customers will end up paying yet another amount when the dust has settled.
Some insurances will only cover a different brand (or size) of pea, and may or may not partially cover the cost of the peas being sold in that particular store. Some customers will have to prove that they really need the peas, especially if their insurance only approves of carrots. Some people that need peas won’t get them and some people that don’t want peas will get them. No wonder healthcare systems feel the pressure to outsource the accounting jobs to sweatshops overseas. The billing system has been so screwed up by the privatizing Republicans that we “can’t afford” to do it in America!
We don’t ask our fire stations to generate a profit. We don’t ask our grade schools to generate a profit. We don’t ask FEMA to generate a profit. Taxpayers support these community services because they understand how important they are to a healthy society. Taxpayers want hospitals, doctors and nurses, too. The Republican scheme of private/no insurance not only degrades the infrastructure and staffing of our health care system, it denies and delays care (can you spell “r-a-t-i-o-n-i-n-g”?) and alienates potential caregivers.
The federal defunding of healthcare and corporatization of healthcare has also led to other problems. Many small hospitals and rural hospitals have had to cut back services or close. Others have been bought, looted and closed in a capitalistic competition to prioritize dividends to investors over the delivery of healthcare to the community. Every hospital that closes is the loss of an irreplaceable asset that America bought for itself. Hospitals are vital resources providing not only healthcare and social services, but good jobs that are meaningful and contribute to the well-being of society. The closure of a hospital results in decreased healthcare access, increased morbidity, disability and mortality, unemployment in the community, stressors on other social aid agencies, depersonalized care at overcrowded facilities, and inability to respond to unpredictable mass emergencies like earthquakes, storms, epidemics or terrorism.
It makes sense to join the rest of the civilized world and create a single payer universal health care (Medicare for All) plan. For one thing, it would vastly simplify the billing system and cut accounting costs by half or more. We could return those jobs to America – and we’d go one better if those jobs went to the people who want to work but have disabilities (or a rural location) where they must work from home. All that these accounting jobs require is specialized education, a phone and a computer. If a person in India can do it, then a JBLM veteran in a wheelchair or a farmer’s wife in Moses Lake can do it.
Washingtonians should have the jobs generated by Washington hospitals and clinics. Nurses shouldn’t have to go on strike to get designated sick leave. These are negative reflections on a healthcare system forced to prioritize profit over healthcare. The corporatized private/no insurance healthcare (i.e., the Republican model) has failed our citizens. Medicare for All. It works.