Health Care Worker Strikes

Janson Silvers  0:02  
Welcome to Healthcare Policy pop. I'm Janson Silvers it's Tuesday, October 24 2023. Today's pop topics, a historic health care workers strike in multiple states is resolved. But that doesn't mean issues with the system are. In case you missed it the most recent workforce to go on strike was 85,000 Kaiser Permanente employees across hospitals to serve nearly 13 million people talking about the reasons why is Benson Hsu, a Professor of Pediatrics at the University of South Dakota Stanford School of Medicine,

Benson Hsu  0:35  
It was a short strike. It wasn't a forever type of strike. But it was really to kind of bring up this idea that the employees weren't really being taken care of from a wage perspective. And at the same time they employees were concerned that the patients weren't being taken care of from a staffing perspective. So I think there is that combination of this isn't just the employees asking for something for themselves. This was also in combination with them asking for what their patients need.

Janson Silvers  1:00  
We asked Dr. Hsu how it came to a strike on the local level.

Benson Hsu  1:04  
And recently, what we've seen from a hospital perspective is that margins are getting razor thin. Now we're talking about an organization like Kaiser, you're still talking about billions of dollars when it comes to margin. But overall, that relationship is becoming smaller and smaller. Between that and increase in expenses, such as from the employees, from nursing shortages, from supply chain issues, decrease in reimbursement, there's a lot of pressure, financial pressure being put on the hospitals and health systems.

Janson Silvers  1:32  
And what about the workers? Why did they need to strike?

Benson Hsu  1:35  
From the nursing perspective, from the patient care perspective, we're also seeing a lot of pressure because that financial pressure on the system, staffing ratios are becoming more and more difficult to maintain. We're trying to do more with less. And so there's that conflict between the sustainability of a hospital and a system and doing the right things in paying your employees and making sure that they're safe staff and they show.

Janson Silvers  1:55  
But what about those that matter most, the patients?

Benson Hsu  2:00  
So what dp the patients want? They want a safe place where they can take their family take themselves to get care that they need to maintain their health in the community. So where do you stand? If you give the employees the appropriate staffing ratio, if you give them the raises that are demanded, true, things will become better, but it'll become short term because the hospitals may actually go under. So that's an unsustainable aspect from a system perspective. So it's a balance.

Janson Silvers  2:28  
In this case, since patients don't really have a role in the outcome of these situations, Hsu says patients are left to suffer in the middle of it all.

Benson Hsu  2:37  
What I see unfortunately right now is that whatever the decision, the patient seems like they're gonna get hurt. So we have the appropriate wage increases, we increase the staffing ratio, maybe some hospitals will have to close because they're unable to sustain that. You don't do that in the staffing ratio remains unsafe, and then the patient gets hurt that way.

Janson Silvers  2:56  
So what can be done? Hsu says the answer, like the problem is complicated.

Benson Hsu  3:01  
It does feel that way. It feels like it's a solution that doesn't have a perfect answer. When I think about government intervention, when I think about establishing standards from a government perspective, I think there's, you know, I want to focus on one thing, which is things such as safe staffing ratio, you know, what does that say that mean? And should that be different? If you're living in an environment where there is an overwhelming amount of nurses and you're just not hiring them because your expenses too high? Should that be allowable? Should we set a standard where an ICU bed should have a certain number of nurses assigned to that ICU bed,

Janson Silvers  3:33  
the Kaiser strike has ended and workers are set to receive a 21% wage increase over the next four years. A spokesperson for the union says that millions of Americans are safer today because of the agreement. You can read more by using the link in the show notes.

Finally, today, Patient Rising Now is releasing its latest report entitled Prescription Drug Formularies Transparency and Reform. The report is a deep dive into current formulary practices from discriminatory tearing practices, built in biases against generics and biosimilars to access and use restrictions. Patients Rising Now is calling on elected officials and 2024 candidates to pass bills that improve transparency of PBM actions, remove unethical practices that restrict some chronically ill patient from receiving their full pharmacy benefit and allowing patients to access low cost generics and biosimilars through open competition. A link to the full report is in the show notes. That's all for today. We're back on Thursday for another health care policy pop, a resource of Patients Rising Now. I'm chanson Silver's, have a great day.