Around 6,000 registered nurses in New York could go on strike before the end of 2011. This is in part due to hospitals requiring an increase in the amount that nurses would have to pay for their health insurance premiums. It also has a lot to do with the cuts that hospitals are facing from Medicaid and Medicare payments.
It is entirely possible that nurses in New York, who are represented by the New York State Nurses’ Association union, will end up striking. The union hasn’t yet given an official ten-day strike warning, and there is some potential for a settlement to happen.
If not, then 6,000 registered nurses could walk out of Mount Sinai hospital, Montefiore Medical Center, and St. Luke’s-Roosevelt Hospital Center in New York before the end of 2011.
Across the country, in California, 23,000 nurses who were represented by the California Nurses Association staged a one-day strike in September of 2011. Another one-day walkout is about to happen on December 22, 2011. This will affect eight hospitals that are located in the San Francisco Bay area, and one that is located in Long Beach.
The nurses feel that they are being disrespected professionally. They don’t like the way hospitals have come to resemble corporations. They see hospitals cutting care to patients, while at the same time, paying their top executives millions of dollars. The same hospitals are requiring nurses to start paying more for their health insurance plans.
In general, the people who administrate, and make the big decisions for, the hospitals feel that the nurses are being unreasonable. They point out that many corporations, all across the nation, and in many different fields, are requiring employees to pay more for their health insurance premiums.
They feel that the nurses should have to do the same. The hospitals are also defending the amount of money paid to top executives as deserved, due to the competition one must overcome in order to get that type of job.
If the nurses go on strike, it generally leads to poorer quality care for patients at the hospitals. In September, a cancer patient died in a hospital in Oakland, California, after a temporarily hired nurse made a medical error. The National Bureau of Economic Research finds that patient mortality rates increase by 19.4% during a nurses strike, and that 6.5% of the patients who were treated during the nurses strike end up returning to the hospital within 30 days.
All hospitals are facing cuts in the payments that they receive for treating patients who use Medicare or Medicaid. Some of that funding is now tied to patient satisfaction surveys. Hospitals that treat patients poorly will end up receiving less funding from those programs. One thing that improves the quality of patient care is when the hospital has qualified nurses on staff. This is, of course, assuming that the hospital has enough nurses working at any given time.
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