Medicine-For-Profit Has Left Healthcare Workers without the Protections They Need
Supply shortages and understaffing have placed healthcare workers in the direct line of fire. Blame rests with ill-preparedness and unresponsiveness, but are these just symptoms of a privatized industry that has long valued profit over its workers’ — and patients’ — safety?
As the coronavirus pandemic rages on, its death-toll now surpassing 15,000 people worldwide, many Americans have voiced concern over the safety of healthcare workers fighting the virus on the frontlines.
Much attention has been paid to the myriad dangers doctors and nurses are facing due to a long foreseen scarcity in hospital supplies. Healthcare workers across the country are reporting severe shortages in personal protective equipment (PPE), including masks, gowns, and N95 respirators, and the American Hospital Association and American Nurses Association have both urged government officials to “[increase] domestic production of medical supplies and equipment that hospitals, health systems, physicians, nurses and all front line providers so desperately need.”
The stakes of this shortage are high: doctors, nurses, and other healthcare workers are at an increased risk of contracting the coronavirus and, even more sobering, they seem to be getting sicker from it than other patients. For “reasons that we don’t understand,” Dr. Peter Hotez, professor and dean at Baylor College of Medicine, recently lamented, “frontline healthcare workers are at great risk for serious illness despite their younger age.”
All these occupational hazards have been met with an outpouring of public support from those of us safely (if also anxiously) stuck at home, worrying less about the virus than we are about where the next roll of toilet paper — or paycheck — is coming from. Petitions are being signed, Tweets are being re-Tweeted, and op-eds are being debated.
This concern has been, and will continue to be, crucial for addressing the crisis at hand. But as we hunker down and shelter-in-place for the foreseeable future, we must remember that the present pandemic did not so much cause these dangerous conditions and shortages for healthcare workers as it did expose them. Global outbreak has brought to the surface strains and stresses that all those on the wrong side of the medicine-for-profit production line — nurses, lab technicians, respiratory therapists, aides, and other caregivers — have long endured.
High turnover rates, patient safety errors, and general burnout were customary in hospitals across the country well before COVID-19 was a blip on the public health radar. Widespread understaffing has threatened healthcare professionals’ — and patients’ — wellbeing for decades, with the United States consistently underperforming in global healthcare access and quality indices.
One-half of physicians and one-third of nurses experience symptoms of burnout, typically defined as a combination of exhaustion, cynicism, and perceived inefficacy. Chronic job stress has endangered the lives of not only health professionals but also their patients, with preventable medical errors the third leading cause of death in the United States.
And while the healthcare industry blames problems like understaffing on a shortage of workers in the medical field, specifically nurses, research conducted in 2017 by the Health Resources and Services Administration has shown that most states actually have nurse surpluses. The issue, it seems, isn’t about restricted labor pools; it’s about the reluctance of an industry to cut profit margins.
Poor work environments and understocked supplies in hospitals have been commonplace at least since the surge in healthcare costs during the 1980s and 90s, when reliance on private insurance expenditures began eclipsing more affordable and patient-centered options. While nonprofit insurance companies served a pivotal role in providing accessible healthcare during the postwar period, aggressive marketing and powerful lobbying in the intervening decades enabled for-profit plans — which care about bottom lines, not people — to take over and dominate the market.
Since then, an ethos of putting short-term gains over long-term goals concerning health outcomes, safety, and supplies has become standard practice. This ethos has not only left many healthcare professionals overworked and underpaid; it has also left them vulnerable to communicable illness at a time when they’re needed most.
Across the country, nurses and hospital technicians are receiving little training to deal with patients who test positive for COVID-19. They’re being asked to re-use (and re-use and re-use) PPE such as N95s. And, despite all the wartime rhetoric surrounding the pandemic, boots on the ground still aren’t seeing any hazard pay.
As healthcare professionals and their unions fight for the protections they need, and we at home do what we can from the sidelines, it’s important to recognize that understaffing, understocked supplies, and weakened safety protocols are part and parcel of America’s medical industrial complex.
Nurses, physicians, and all those who keep the gears of healthcare turning will weather this storm as they have every other, but we all must be vigilant in addressing the inequalities and inadequacies faced everyday — pandemic or no pandemic — by those who have been called to cure sometimes, treat often, and care always.
