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Health Care

Week Three: Oregon’s Largest Healthcare Workers Strike

January 28, 2025 Lyn Neeley, Workers World. , , , , ,
Portland, Oregon - Providence Health & Services’ health care workers are entering the third week of the largest nurse’s strike in Oregon’s history. Nearly 5,000 nurses, physicians, clinicians, midwives and other medical professionals from eight Portland area hospitals are demanding decent health care benefits, safe staffing, competitive wages and the hiring of more caregivers. Providence pays some of the lowest wages, and its workers have among the worst health care benefits in the region. When sick, nurses are forced to use their vacation days, stay home without pay or come to work sick, because Providence doesn’t provide sick time!

US Health Insurance System Is Failing, Say Doctors

January 27, 2025 Michael Sainato, The Guardian. , , , ,
American doctors are accusing US health insurance giants of causing deadly delays to vital medical procedures and care – and putting profits ahead of their patients’ health. Firms including United Healthcare have denied basic scans, and taken months to reconsider, according to physicians who spoke to the Guardian. “There’s good evidence that these kinds of delays literally kill people,” said Dr Ed Weisbart, former chief medical officer for Express Scripts, one of the largest prescription benefits managers in the US. “For some people, this isn’t just an inconvenience and an annoyance and an aggravation.

Doctor And Patients Protest UnitedHealth’s Record Earnings

January 23, 2025 Chris Mills Rodrigo, Inequality.org. , , , ,
America’s largest health care company, the UnitedHealth Group, pulled in over $100 billion in revenue in just the fourth quarter of 2024 alone. For the full year, the giant’s insurance division, UnitedHealthcare, reported record revenue of $298.2 billion, the company announced last Thursday. These staggering revenue totals actually fell below investor expectations. UnitedHealth Group shares, right after the announcement, slipped 6 percent on the New York Stock Exchange. Meanwhile, just outside that capitalist bastion, victims of our for-profit healthcare system — doctors and patients alike — were braving freezing temperatures to call out the suffering that engineered UnitedHealth’s exorbitant earnings.

Thousands Of Resident Physicians In Philadelphia Voted To Unionize

January 22, 2025 Aubrey Whelan, Portside. , , , , ,
Eight in 10 doctors-in-training in Philadelphia are now represented by unions, following a wave of labor organizing across major health systems in the region. Doctors at three Philadelphia health systems and Delaware's largest health provider voted to join the Committee of Interns and Residents, a division of the Service Employees International Union. The move follows a national trend of physicians unionizing around the country, as doctors increasingly look for solutions to burnout in a field now dominated by large health system employers.

Patients Are Dying Because Of Profit-Driven Political Decisions

January 18, 2025 The Canary. , , , ,
In 2025, campaign group EveryDoctor is stepping up its work to save the NHS from privatisation, and build a functioning, flourishing healthcare system for patients and staff alike. However, there’s work to do. The group wants to grow its following from thousands, to a vibrant patient and staff community of millions. It feels it will take nothing short of this to turn things around because: millions of people are currently being profoundly failed by politicians In short, the group aims to transform its campaign community into something more: a movement. Its ambitious goal comes amidst another spate of alarming news stories over the appalling state of things in the NHS.

Improved Medicare For All Can Heal This Sick Country

January 18, 2025 Kay Tillow, Judy Albert, Claire M. Cohen, Ed Grystar and Ana Malinow, Common Dreams. , , ,
It’s the beginning of the end for corporate control of health care. The tsunami of outrage against the health insurance industry in the wake of the shooting of United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson, can propel an urgent, unyielding demand for the removal of profit from healthcare and the enactment of a universal, national single payer system. That is, if the single payer, Medicare for All, national health service movement can summon the vision and audacity to rise to the occasion.

Essential Health Workers Hold Solidarity Picket On Day 38 Of Strike

January 18, 2025 Fight Back! News. , , , ,
Duluth, MN – At 4 p.m. on a blustery January 15 in Duluth, workers from Essentia Health-Deer River pulled up in a bus in front of the Essentia Health-Duluth hospital and began a solidarity picket in front of the main entrance to the hospital. The Deer River Essentia workers are represented by the Service Employees International Union, Healthcare Minnesota and Iowa (SEIU HCMNIA). January 15 marked their 38th day of an open-ended strike at their hospital and nursing home. The healthcare workers are striking over pay, saying that cost of living has gone up and they need real raises to keep paying the bills.

Health Care Profiteers Encounter Protest At ‘Investors’ Gathering

January 16, 2025 Leon Kunstenaar, Indybay. , , ,
One of the wealthiest gangsters, JP Morgan Chase Bank, convened into the posh Westin St. Francis hotel a gathering of fellow "investors" involved in the organized looting known as the "Health care" industry. Sensing public anger inspired by the recent killing of a UnitedHealthcare executive, a heavy police presence surrounded the hotel and the adjoining streets. The largest health "insurer" in the country is UnitedHealthcare. Its 2023 profit was $22 billion. Estimates of what a single payer health care system to care for every man, woman and child in the country are about $20 billion per year.

The ‘Uber Model’ Comes For Nursing

January 15, 2025 Aastha Uprety, Inequality.org. , , ,
The “gig” model of labor popularized by Uber has found a new sector to upend: health care. On-demand nursing companies likeCareRev, Clipboard Health, ShiftKey, and ShiftMed promise understaffed hospitals more control and overworked nurses more flexibility. But this labor model and the companies that push it endanger workers and patients alike. In a recently published brief for the Roosevelt Institute, Groundwork Collaborative Fellow Katie J. Wells and Funda Ustek Spilda, senior lecturer at King’s College London, dig into the harms and pitfalls of what is being called “Uber for nursing.”

Nurses And Doctors Are On Strike At Eight Oregon Hospitals

January 15, 2025 Kari Thompson, Labor Notes. , , , , ,
Declaring that understaffing had them “running on empty,” 5,000 nurses, doctors, midwives, and nurse practitioners walked off the job January 10 in an open-ended strike at Providence Health and Services, the dominant hospital chain in the Pacific Northwest. The strikers work at eight hospitals plus women’s health clinics across Oregon. They’re demanding proper staffing, affordable health insurance, and competitive pay that can attract and retain seasoned workers. “I’ve been with Providence for over 30 years, and I have seen what’s changed,” said medical-surgical nurse Kim Martin at Providence Portland Medical Center.

The CDC, Palantir And The AI-Healthcare Revolution

January 15, 2025 Max Jones, Scheer Post. , ,
The Pentagon and Silicon Valley are in the midst of cultivating an even closer relationship as the Department of Defense (DoD) and Big Tech companies seek to jointly transform the American healthcare system into one that is “artificial intelligence (AI)-driven.” The alleged advantages of such a system, espoused by the Army itself, Big Tech and Pharma executives as well as intelligence officers, would be unleashed by the rapidly developing power of so-called “predictive medicine,” or “a branch of medicine that aims to identify patients at risk of developing a disease, thereby enabling either prevention or early treatment of that disease.”

New York City Doctors Are Ready To Strike

January 14, 2025 Juan Cruz Ferre, Left Voice. , , , ,
Nearly 1000 doctors in NYC Health and Hospitals (H+H) are ready to go on strike. They may work at public (H+H) hospitals, but their employers are corporate health systems, such as Mount Sinai, NYU, and PAGNY. The doctors — who are organized with the Doctors Council, an SEIU affiliate (DC-SEIU) — are denouncing chronic understaffing. They understand this problem to be the result of uncompetitive contracts, both in terms of salary and benefits. Since the announcement on January 2, Mayor Eric Adams interceded to ask for a 60-day “cooling-off” period, trying to avert the work stoppage, and negotiations are still underway.

Annual ‘Winners’ For Most Egregious US Healthcare Profiteering Announced

January 8, 2025 Marina Dunbar, The Guardian. , , ,
The 2024 “winners” of the annual Shkreli awards, given each year to perpetrators of the most egregious examples of profiteering and dysfunction within the healthcare industry, have been released from the Lown Institute, an independent healthcare thinktank. The recipients are chosen by a panel made up of health policy experts, clinicians, journalists and advocates. The awards are named after Martin Shkreli, the infamous “pharma bro” who rose to international notoriety after increasing the price of lifesaving anti-parasitic drug Daraprim 50-fold.

Philadelphia’s Doctors-In-Training Are Unionizing By The Thousands

January 8, 2025 Juan Cruz Ferre and Jason Koslowski, Left Voice. , , , ,
I think pretty universally in medical training, there’s an under-appreciation and under-compensation of medical residents. A lot of it comes down to pay, because that’s so fundamental, but other benefits, like time off and parental leave, are certainly a major concern for people, and moonlighting and overtime and things like that generally are under-compensated as well. At my hospital specifically, there are concerns about access to appropriate equipment and basic medical supplies. So, a lot of this becomes very much like logistical issues.

Gaza Health Ministry Warns Of ‘Real Disaster Sweeping Hospitals’

January 7, 2025 News Desk, The Cradle. , , , , , , , , ,
The Health Ministry in Gaza warned on 7 January that the medical sector in the strip is facing a disaster due to crippling shortages of essential supplies and humanitarian aid. The ministry released a statement warning “of a real disaster that is sweeping hospitals, oxygen stations, medicine refrigerators, and nurseries in all health facilities remaining in operation in the Gaza Strip.” “There is no fuel stock in hospitals due to the policy of dripping in fuel that the occupation has been following in bringing in since the beginning of the war on Gaza.
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