Executive Director’s Column

Corporate Healthcare is on notice in 2021

If one good thing can come out of this year, it’s that the pandemic has shone a bright light on how the U.S. healthcare system wasn’t, and still isn’t, prepared to deal with a global pandemic.

This is due in large part to corporations running our healthcare system like a business, implementing business models that may work in, say the auto industry, but do not work in healthcare – models such as lean management which is a way to do more and more with less and less – less human effort, less equipment, less time, and less space.

We know it’s about minimizing costs to maximize profit, not to take care of patients. Operating under the lean management model has caused a lack of inventory of PPE, a drastic shortage of nurses and other frontline healthcare workers, and a deskilling of healthcare professionals. This is not an economically efficient way to run a healthcare system nor is it a safe and humane way to provide care to those in need. The pandemic has laid bare the fact that we have no public health infrastructure, which puts all our health at risk.

In 2021, MNA will focus on anticorporate healthcare for our legislative agenda. We got a head start by endorsing candidates in 2020 who support healthcare reform and collective bargaining. We also want to focus on it at the bargaining table. We will make sure that proposals for upcoming negotiations include demands that will better protect us from corporate healthcare going forward.

Now that the public has seen the damage this kind of healthcare can do, we need to seize the moment and use our power to make change. There is no better time for us to demonstrate there is a better way to ensure the public’s health – we must up the ante and work harder than ever to take our healthcare out of the hands of corporate elites and put it back into the hands of nurses and others who compassionately provide the care.

No more trying to make a corporatized, market-based system work at the cost of patients’ lives. It’s time for the public and frontline healthcare workers to come together to create oversight of these hospital systems to prevent closures of clinics and hospitals based on financial greed instead of community health needs and to ultimately enact a single payer, MN Health Plan. The time for Medicare for All is now.