Listen: ‘It’s About Healthcare, Stupid’
The Long Island Federation of Labor stands with nurses fighting back against the closure of St. Catherine of Siena Hospital.
By Bob Hennelly
This week’s episode of the Stuck Nation Labor Radio Hour is all about Healthcare! Healthcare! Healthcare! Tomorrow, voters in New Hampshire will head to the polls in the first-in-the-nation 2024 Presidential primaries — and the corporate news media is doing what it always does — focusing on the horse race that fixates on personalities and the amount of cash that’s been amassed by the candidates.
What’s always missing in the coverage, however, is any discussion of life and death issues like the implosion of the U.S. healthcare system as reflected in our plummeting average life expectancy global ranking.
As America’s healthcare access and affordability crisis grows worse by the day, the Biden administration’s post-pandemic decision to “unwind” Medicaid, the subsidized healthcare coverage for the poor, has resulted in over 8 .4 million people losing coverage, including 3.39 million children. Iowa culled their eligibility roles by 129,000, a 16-percent cut, while New Hampshire tossed off 70,000 — a 28 percent drop in the Medicaid rolls. That’s according to a 50-state analysis by Georgetown University’s McCourt School of Public Policy.
In this episode we dedicate the full hour to the healthcare crisis that is this nation’s number one labor issue whether the national AFL-CIO has the guts to say so or not. We speak with Dr. Steven Auerbach with the Physicians for a National Health Program. He discusses the public health ramifications of our current for-profit healthcare system which is the world’s most expensive, but most poorly performing — as so tragically exhibited during the COVID pandemic.
In the second half of the program, we get an update on how the New York State Nurses Association [NYSNA] is fighting to prevent the closure of St. Catherine's Hospital’s Maternal Child Health Services on Long Island with longtime NYSNA members Marie Boyle and Holly Meduri. Closure would mean a devastating loss to the community of labor and delivery, post-partum, and neonatal intensive care facilities — forcing pregnant individuals to travel an extra 30 to 40 more minutes to the nearest hospitals.
The closure of these services comes amid a national maternal and infant mortality crisis. A recent study has shown a doubling of maternal deaths over the last 20 years, with New York having a high pregnancy-related mortality rate of 18.2 per 100,000 live births, with 78% of those deaths preventable.
Listen to the entire show below: