[fiestynurse]

The Patriot-News
February 13, 2004
Hershey Foods deals with strike in Canada
By Bill Sulon

Repercussions of the week-old strike at a Hershey Foods Corp. plant in Canada are being felt in the candy maker's hometown (Derry Twp., Hershey,PA).

Production has not been increased at Hershey's plants in Derry Twp. and
elsewhere, although that could happen with a prolonged strike. Instead,
the impact is more subtle, and potentially long lasting.

The walkout by nearly 600 workers at Hershey's plant in Smiths Falls,
Ontario, and their contract negotiations with management are being closely
monitored by the union representing nearly 3,000 Hershey employees in
DerryTwp.

Interest is keen because Hershey's decisions on which of its dozen plants
in the United States, Canada and Mexico gets new production work hinge on a
variety of factors, including the cost of doing business at each facility.

"Each plant competes with the sister plants," said Robert Feaser, business
manager for Chocolate Workers Local 464, which represents workers at Hershey's West Chocolate Avenue and 19 E. Chocolate Ave. plants. "They make the stuff at the cheapest place they can do it. Whatever one plant can get has an overall effect on what other plants get."

If the striking workers in Canada get what they are seeking -- early retirement incentives with no reduction in benefits in exchange for smaller raises -- union workers at other Hershey plants will no doubt take notice when their contracts expire, Feaser said. "We should be comparing notes with one another," Feaser said of his Canadian counterparts. Such a comparison is difficult, given the starkly different health benefits and somewhat different pension plans available to workers in Canada and
the United States. In 2002, Hershey workers in Derry Twp. went on strike for six weeks over the company's plan to require employees to contribute more toward their health-benefit costs. Workers agreed to a contract that kept their health insurance co-payments stable for four years in exchange for smaller pay.

Comment: Much has been written about the competitive advantage of
Canadian businesses over those in the United States due to the government provided health care coverage in Canada. It is interesting to see that these macroeconomic differences also impact the microeconomics of competing plants within the same company. Establishing a national health program in the United States would certainly simplify these issues, not to mention the obvious fact that it would ensure

[ktwlpn]

Originally Posted by kitkat24

Study: Taxes Pay for Most Obesity Costs.......

Question:

What ethical responsibility do taxpayers have to healthcare problems related to lifestyle choice??

Universal healthcare will cause all taxpayers to pay for all of the lifestyle choices of other people, even if you exercise eat right, do not smoke, and take care of yourself......

Question-what healthcare problems are deserving of your tax dollars? I would vote to draw the line on artificial feeding....I would not treat any one for aspiration pneumonia more then once if they had advance directives stating they never wanted any artificial feeding.I would balk at my tax dollars paying to house patients that will always be dependent for care..let their families bear that burden-they choose to give them life so let them care for them....generation after generation....Sounds harsh and ridiculous doesn't it? No one can decide whose life is more valuable other then the person living it....Not me-not you

[pickledpepperRN]

The Edwards Plan:

Require businesses and other employers to either cover their employees or help finance their health insurance.

Make insurance affordable by creating new tax credits, expanding Medicaid and SCHIP, reforming insurance laws, and taking innovative steps to contain health care costs.

Create regional Health Markets purchasing pools to give every American the bargaining power to purchase an affordable, high-quality health plan, increase choices among insurance plans, and cut costs for businesses offering insurance.

Once these steps have been taken, require all American residents to get insurance.

Under the Edwards Plan:

Families without insurance will get coverage at an affordable price.
Families with insurance will pay less and get more security and choices.
Businesses and other employers will find it cheaper and easier to insure their workers.

http://johnedwards.com/about/issues/...e-overview.pdf

[aednurse]

Amen
This is just I wanted to say but you said it with elegance. Anything the gov runs already is broken except for their own health & retirement plans thank you for the input. Most of us nurses are care givers & have the need fix & repair, but do not look @ how the long term will effect us.

[HM2Viking]

Originally Posted by aednurse

Amen
This is just I wanted to say but you said it with elegance. Anything the gov runs already is broken except for their own health & retirement plans thank you for the input. Most of us nurses are care givers & have the need fix & repair, but do not look @ how the long term will effect us.

SS works
Medicare works.

Both actually deliver their services at lower costs than what the private sector can acheve..

[Chico David RN]

Kathy: I appreciate the search for answers, but it's clear you've been exposed to a lot of unfounded propaganda about universal healthcare systems.
quote=kitkat24;647008]Thanks for the articles and opinions and input! It is great.

What is the difference between "government-run" healthcare and "universal healthcare" ? I assumed these were the same thing. If the government did not run "universal healthcare" then who would?

The government always plays some role, but that role varies widely around the world. We need to remember a few things: If we look at say the top 20 countries in the world on income and development level - the countries that are our peers - every one except the US has some form of universal care, all of them achieve results in things like infant mortality and life expectancy and many more directly care related measures that are as good as ours or better, and all of them do it for less money than we spend now. One of the facts many Americans don't know is that the exact model varies widely. Only Britain and Spain have truly socialized systems - where the doctors and nurses work for the Government. Most of the others have some mix of public finance and private delivery. And in quite a few - France, Germany, Switzerland - the system is based on highly regulated non-profit insurance companies. None of them other than us has a major role for for-profit insurance companies.

What about the notion mentioned in the first article about ingenuity and invention? What about the idea that we are motivated by money? We sure are movitated by money, as RN's, come contract time, aren't we? If in a universal healthcare Doctors and nurses make what a bus driver makes, then where is the incentive? Where is the incentive for pharmaceutical companies to invent new drugs to treat cancer and autoimmune disease and HIV and come up with new antibiotics or anti-virals or new vaccines. Has Canada been inventive? Have government run universal healthcare systems displayed ingenuity? When one in 8 of us females develop breast cancer, do we want there to be a newly developed treatment, so that we can survive to raise our children?

I haven't really seen a good study on innovation in other countries, but just anecdotally, I do a lot of journal reading and try to keep up with latest developments in cardiology and cardiac surgery and I note that a lot of new surgical techniques and a lot of new drugs are developed in other countries with universal systems. Many of the journal articles describing new techniques seem to have been written in France or Italy or Germany. The drug market is incredibly international - most of the drugs we use here were made overseas, most of the companies are multi-national and people everywhere else get the same drugs we do for a lot less money.

I am looking for answers for these types of questions. It seems that they are not out there. Even the Harvard study does not show the cons of universal healthcare. The only thing they discuss is a 16 weeks wait for elective surgery. Well, if you need a simply lap chole for gallstones, that is elective surgery. You could be fine and just need the lap chole, right? If you are required to wait 4 months or 16 weeks for an elective lap chole, and a gall stone becomes logded in your common bile duct, and you then develop pancreatitis and need TPN and lipids and IV pain medication before you can even have your surgery, that ends up being far more costly, doesn't it? I am sure a mastectomy is an elective surgery. Do you want to wait 4 months to have the cancer cut out of your breast? Most surgeries are elective, even we patients know and feel that they are not elective. The only surgery that is not elective is emergency or trauma patients. Where are the people to question that aspect?

things like waiting times vary a lot from place to place and procedure to procedure. 16 weeks is nothing remotely like the norm anywhere. On the other hand my mother in law has found that her kidneys are failing and is having a 4 month wait for the first available appointment with a nephrologist here in our part of California. Friends in New York tell me the wait for a mammogram can be several months there. The system I know best is the French, since I like to travel there. What I have learned is that they pay as a nation about 60% of what we do for healthcare, they have less wait time than we do, no limits on choice of doctor, no limits on seeing specialists, all the same drugs and techniques available. And some very smart incentives that encourage people with chronic diseases to maintain them well.

And, paperwork that physicians and nurses do is not soley for administration, is it? Why do nurses chart for hours on five patients? Is it to prevent law suits and cover your butt, or is it simply wasted administration? How would universal care prevent the need for doctors and nurses to thoroughly chart on each and every patient?

Actually, a lot of the charting we do now is not for actual patient care, but to prove that the doctor or hospital did their job so they can get paid. Most of the universal healthcare countries to tend to have shorter and simpler charting than we do. And doctors don't waste time trying to fight for getting an insurer to pay for treatment.

And, what about law suits? Who would be sued in malpratice and who would pay in universal healthcare? Would the taxpayers pay for malpractice suits? Could a patient sue the government (TAX PAYERS) as well?

People in the US sue for malpractice a lot more and malpractice costs are much higher here than in other countries, even though most patients injured by their doctors don't sue. Is this some character defect of ours? No, it's the logical result of our system. In the US we are largely a "you're on your own" society. If you are injured and disabled by medical negligence, your only hope of getting your healthcare and other basic needs met and being able to live with some dignity is to sue someone and prove they're at fault. In most of the Universal Healthcare countries, people who are disabled get their care needs and other human needs met just in the normal course of things. So they don't need to sue, so no big lawyer fees, no court costs, no long delays to settlement. Much cheaper and simpler and more humane.

Where is patient choice in universal care? What are your options and choices versus government run universal care? We think we are limited now by HMO's, I have a feeling we aint seen nothin' yet, until we have the government telling us what hosptials to use etc.

Actually, in most of the universal healthcare countries, and all of the proposals for the US, patients would have complete choice of doctor - any doctor you want, any hospital you want, not just the one your HMO has a deal with.

What are patient to nurse ratios in a universal care system, and what EXACTLY are the wages for say an RN who has worked full time for 5 years in our current system, versus an RN who has worked full time for the same lenghth of time under universal care. These are also things that we need to consider that NOBODY seems to mention or discuss in any of the articles. I want to see figures: EXAMPLE UNiversal care RN makes $26.50 per hour and a RN in US current system makes $28.00 per hour. I want wage hours for comparsion. Do UNiversal care RN's get overtime pay? Do universal care RN's get paid hourly or on salary with no overtime pay?

None of those things are particularly related to whether there is universal care or not - remember, in most universal care countries and in most of the proposals for us here, the delivery system remains the same as it does now. You work for the same hospital, under the same contract. Only difference is that instead of dealing with 50 or more differnt insurers, your hospital business office deals with one. No reason that should change any of the items you mention.

I sometimes feel that nurses are so brain-washed by the democratic party of the US. They walk along like mindless sheep following the pro abortion, pro DFL agenda and just incessantly chant the mantra that the DFL'ers tell them to believe: Universal care, government run healthcare, and they do not submit any of the above questions.

I submit: Look at Medicaid and Medicare and then ask yourself if you want the government overseeing all of your medical care and determining what is best for you!

Medicaid is a lousy system because it is for poor people. Systems set up just for the poor are always underfinanced and poorly run, since the poor have little power to complain. Medicare works quite well actually - pays as well as most private insurance and pays faster and more reliably, and with much lower admin costs. The best insurance of quality in a universal system is that if everyone is in the same system, including the powerful and the government officials, they have a big incentive to make it work well - they depend on it themselves!

Please, keep the information and opinions coming. It needs to be discussed.
Kathy MN RN[/quote]

[CRNA2007]

Social security is going bankrupt and medicare reimbursement is a joke. How can SS be working if we constantly here liberals decry elderly choosing between (take your pick) gas, medicine, smokes, alcohol, etc... and food? Please don't tell me Liberals are just fearmongering that would be a total shock to the rest of us.

Originally Posted by HM2Viking

SS works
Medicare works.

Both actually deliver their services at lower costs than what the private sector can acheve..

[navvet]

from page 1/11 kitkat24, thank you sooooo much for your proposed questions on this topic. Now, there is someone using their noggin for something other than a hat rack. If I have put the time in to be an LPN, RN, BSN, MSN etc. There is no way in HADES that I will EXCEPT the pay of a Masters degreed Social Worker....$19,000 a year folks. Can you live on that salary alone? At today's prices....5-10-15 years from now? sure, you may want to learn how to say, "Pass the newspaper i am cold, while your up honey, fix the tape on the cardboard box house door, the wind is blowing in."

[Chico David RN]

It interesting in observing this thread, that supporters of universal healthcare quite often argue from data - actual facts comparing the performance of one system to another - see posts 3 and 5 back at the begining of the thread, or my own 106 lately. The opponents of universal care, argue from ideology and prejudice and never offer any data to support their positions - not surprisingly since there ARE no data that support their positions. They do throw in the odd complete non-sequiter about salary levels or whatnot, but never any actual data.
That's not unique to here of course, since I have argued this subject is lots of different forums and never yet seen a defender of the status quo produce actual data or references to where to find data.
It's strange though, since most of us, at least those who went through a BRN or Masters program, were exposed to some education on interpreting scientific articles and what valid evidence looks like. I guess when one's prejudice is engaged, no amount of evidence is enough.

[Iam46yearsold]

Originally Posted by pickledpepperRN

The Edwards Plan:

Require businesses and other employers to either cover their employees or help finance their health insurance.

Make insurance affordable by creating new tax credits, expanding Medicaid and SCHIP, reforming insurance laws, and taking innovative steps to contain health care costs.

Create regional Health Markets purchasing pools to give every American the bargaining power to purchase an affordable, high-quality health plan, increase choices among insurance plans, and cut costs for businesses offering insurance.

Once these steps have been taken, require all American residents to get insurance.

Under the Edwards Plan:

Families without insurance will get coverage at an affordable price.
Families with insurance will pay less and get more security and choices.
Businesses and other employers will find it cheaper and easier to insure their workers.

http://johnedwards.com/about/issues/...e-overview.pdf

I like Edwards