No one needs another outrage to worry about, but here’s one that could literally be your last worry. Our hospitals are killing us.
Not that the staffers are going room to room snuffing our patients, of course, but hospital owners and top executives are nonetheless killing thousands of ill Americans entrusted to their care. They are doing by deliberately short-staffing their facilities and shortchanging sick and injured people they’re richly paid to serve.
At the core of this outrage is a fatal structural flaw in our healthcare system, namely that these are no longer “our” hospitals. Instead of being public or non-profit entities for the Common Good, focused squarely on patients, hospitals today tend to be private operations controlled by corporate profiteers. Pitting patients against profits is no way to run a hospital, for it means money will ultimately rule over health (and over life itself). Ask a nurse.
These dedicated professionals are the solid pillars of American health. More than doctors and way more than administrators, nurses make a hospital function, providing the primary care and constant, on-site monitoring that are the essence of an ethical, healthy system. Yet, thousands have already fled the work they love, another third plan to leave this year – and thousands more are going on strike.
Why? Because the profit system demands massive staff cuts, leaving way too few nurses to meet the basic needs of patients, causing burnout among nurses… and unnecessary deaths of the people they care for. A damning 2021 study revealed that forcing fewer nurses to tend to an ever-larger caseload effectively killed more than 4,000 New York hospital patients in the previous two years alone.
This is Jim Hightower saying… Yet, the corporate powers insist on treating nurses just as a cost to be cut, arguing that hospitals must have “staffing flexibility.” In other words: Cut nurses/Raise profits.
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Why Are We Letting For-Profit Health Care Kill Us?