Do you know why teachers get paid so little? The gov't has a monopoly on their salaries.
I've heard several people talk about nationalizing healthcare. S. Gordon plugs the concept at the end of 'Nursing against the Odds'.
But here's the question. And maybe it's selfish. But when every hospital is run by the gov't, don't you think that they'll also 'nationalize' a salary. Do you think that salary is going to be the highest common denominator? Or the lowest?
When EVERY hospital pays 16.50/hr, what will your choices really be? You think that's unrealistic? What is medicare paying DRs? A ton of money - if they take on a ton of pts and don't give any of them the time of day. But if you want to be ethical - dr's make peanuts under medicare.
"I'm sorry but the deficit you know - the only way you can get a raise to 17/hr is if you agree to take 8 pts each. And you have to sign a contract agreeing to this forever. And btw, you are a critical national resource, so you can't strike."
Oh sure ,there'll be regional 'costs of living' but that'll just make it worse if you don't live in NY or LA. Because where do you think they're gonna make that money back in salary 'averaging'? It means NY/LA gets 20/hr while Ark/OK get 14.
Oh, and just like teachers, you'll have to prove your competency. Some 'crat in D.C. won't let you practice unless you pass his 'stump the chump' test.
I was just throwing it out there for comment.
How will nationalizing healthcare effect nurses? Is it something we should really advocate? Or advocate against?
But my point is, in Canada, your provinces compete with each other. If tried here, the model is Medicare. And that is national. So, what happens when no regional contracts are allowed?
Because that will happen. 1 gov't agency setting salaries for everybody. And you're right about one thing, the limit to salary setting will be the rate at which a specific salary drives more nurses out of the profession than acceptable. If anybody, gov't or private, could get away with it, they'd pay us minimum wage. I don't think salaries will fall that much, because there are limits in how low you can go without running everybody off.
But with a monopoly on salaries, you can bet that 'how low can we go' will be tested, again and again.
For those of us that have to feed our kiddos and can't depend on a 2nd salaried spouse to help out if we take a less paying job outside of nursing, or no job at all, that is no boon.
~faith,
Timothy.
I can't believe you seriously think that would happen. Who do you think would stay in nursing for that? Nurses are needed, and people will pay us what they have to in order to get us to work. That's the case no matter who is paying our wages. How low can we go is already the motto in healthcare. I'm also single, so it isn't about me having another income to depend on. It's just common sense. In Canada, unions negotiate wages, just like they do here. No one is going to seriously propose paying a national salary. Even national companies have different salaries for the same job depending on location. The RCMP in Canada for instance are government employees, and don't even have the right to strike. They still get cost of living differences in their salaries and paid for OT even though the government has a monopoly on salaries.
The US will never have a national or universal health care system anyways so there is no point in really worrying about it, but I just have to respond when people present wild fears as fact when none of those fears have materialized in places that do have universal health care.
I can't believe you seriously think that would happen. Who do you think would stay in nursing for that? Nurses are needed, and people will pay us what they have to in order to get us to work. That's the case no matter who is paying our wages. How low can we go is already the motto in healthcare. I'm also single, so it isn't about me having another income to depend on. It's just common sense. In Canada, unions negotiate wages, just like they do here. No one is going to seriously propose paying a national salary. Even national companies have different salaries for the same job depending on location. The RCMP in Canada for instance are government employees, and don't even have the right to strike. They still get cost of living differences in their salaries and paid for OT even though the government has a monopoly on salaries.
The US will never have a national or universal health care system anyways so there is no point in really worrying about it, but I just have to respond when people present wild fears as fact when none of those fears have materialized in places that do have universal health care.
It's just an observation.
And I do think the situation w/ teacher's being paid so low, in comparison with their education and amount of work IS a function of the gov't having a monoply on salaries. It's not quite so bad, because those salaries are mandated at the state level - and somewhat subject to intrastate competition. It would be worse with national healthcare dictated by national policy. I don't think that is an unrealistic 'fear'.
And, for the record, I wasn't making a comment on your situation vis a vi being a single parent - or not. I was saying that 'leaving' the profession due to low salaries wouldn't be an option for everyone - and that would certainly be taken into account w/ salary setting.
Salary setting will never be an issue of 'what we're worth' for any employer - gov't or otherwise. It is always an issue of 'what can they get away with paying us.'
And I'm not suggesting that we are about to 'go national' with healthcare so much as I'm commenting on whether it is in nursing's best interest to promote the concept.
Well, she must be talking about how we euthanize people in Canada when they start to need to much health care because we can't afford it. In my hospital we just put them on ice floats and sent them off to die. Yours too? Oh, and you will die waiting for treatment and we don't have any modern equipment and the government will decide what treatment you can have and you can't pick your doctor in Canada.
The flip side of this is Canadians who think that we let people die in the US if they don't have their insurance card on them... :)
I can't believe you seriously think that would happen. Who do you think would stay in nursing for that? Nurses are needed, and people will pay us what they have to in order to get us to work. That's the case no matter who is paying our wages. How low can we go is already the motto in healthcare. I'm also single, so it isn't about me having another income to depend on. It's just common sense. In Canada, unions negotiate wages, just like they do here. No one is going to seriously propose paying a national salary. Even national companies have different salaries for the same job depending on location. The RCMP in Canada for instance are government employees, and don't even have the right to strike. They still get cost of living differences in their salaries and paid for OT even though the government has a monopoly on salaries.
The US will never have a national or universal health care system anyways so there is no point in really worrying about it, but I just have to respond when people present wild fears as fact when none of those fears have materialized in places that do have universal health care.
I agree that we will not have a universal healthcare system. There are way too many companies that would essentially be obsolesed and who are major political contibutors, year after year. Also, the man who is third or fourth in the succesion line to the president has a Frist somewhere in his name. (His father founded HCA). Hundreds of thousands of people whose jobs exist to support our frenetic, disconnected system would be unemployed. To absorb them into a one payor system would more than erode the 20% benefit mentioned in a prior post. So, as messed-up as our model is, I think advocating for a one-payor system is a waste of time, effort and money and that's a shame.
Well, she must be talking about how we euthanize people in Canada when they start to need to much health care because we can't afford it. In my hospital we just put them on ice floats and sent them off to die. Yours too? Oh, and you will die waiting for treatment and we don't have any modern equipment and the government will decide what treatment you can have and you can't pick your doctor in Canada.
The flip side of this is Canadians who think that we let people die in the US if they don't have their insurance card on them... :)
Yeah...horror stories from both sides of the border! Its either the ice floes or forcing them to trudge in snowshoes to die in a snowdrift.
Specializes in LTC, assisted living, med-surg, psych.
And that's a shame, mobilsurgrn, because EVERYONE deserves access to basic health care.
Quite frankly, I think if we got the insurance industry and their multimillionaire CEOs out of health care entirely, we could improve access since they wouldn't be around to 'cherry-pick' healthy customers and deny coverage to the rest of us. But I would NOT want the federal government to oversee health care either........they are great at micromanaging, but there is nothing they can't screw up, complicate, or make a moral issue of, and they shouldn't be involved.
I would want to see each state set up an independent health care board, made up of healthcare providers, private citizens and financial experts. The money that currently goes to the insurance companies would instead be paid into a pool that covers everyone's basic healthcare needs---hospitalization/surgery when required, doctor's visits, preventive care, immunizations, and necessary medications. (YES, healthcare resources would have to be rationed, but how is that any worse than the rationing we're doing now by denying care to 45+ million Americans??). Anything that could be considered a luxury, e.g. most plastic surgery, Viagra etc. would have to be paid for by the individual patient, and new procedures/drugs would continually be evaluated by the board for their effectiveness and cost-to-benefit ratios.
There's a lot of detail that would have to be hashed out, to be certain, but that's how I'd improve access to health care. And, as someone who has been without insurance, and indeed will be again come Wednesday, I know how fearsome it is to wait until the illness is critical before going to the ER, to be unable to pay for the blood-pressure meds that keep one alive, to have to declare bankruptcy because of unpaid medical bills. :stone It needs to change. Soon.
Specializes in NICU, PICU, PCVICU and peds oncology.
Gee, mjlrn97, your vision for health care sounds an awful lot like what happens in Canada! Rationing is a fact of life, no matter which side of the border one lives on. I've been on a waiting list for elective surgery for about 8months, and am content to wait because it IS elective. My problem will not worsen for the waiting, pain-in-the-butt that it is, and I am completely certain that the underlying cause of my problem is not life-threatening, because that has been thoroughly investigated. All it has cost me is parking money.
Now let me play devil's advocate here for a minute. Canada's health care system may be flawed but you can't argue with our results...
(Reminder: Canada's population is roughly 1/10th that of the US.)
I'm proud to be a cog in the wheel that produces such great outcomes. We care for all of the heart transplant patients from western Canada (and elsewhere), sometimes before their surgery, but always after. In three years NO CHILD has died on the waiting list. Only a handful have died after transplant, usually due to complications of their underlying illness. We do good work. (Oh, and I make $35.60 an hour, plus shift differentials.)
Hold the phones here, folks. While not ignoring that the US system has huge flaws, let's not neglect reality, either:
"Canada's provincial leaders pledged C$1 billion (US$640 million) to purchase high-tech equipment starting this year. But any shortening of the typical two-month wait for patients to receive MRI tests and CAT scans isn't likely soon."
"The Fraser Institute's fifteenth annual waiting list survey found that Canada-wide waiting times for surgical and other therapeutic treatments fell slightly in 2005, making this the first reduction in the total wait for treatment measured in Canada since 1993. Total waiting time between referral from a general practitioner and treatment, averaged across all 12 specialties and 10 provinces surveyed, fell from 17.9 weeks in 2004 back to the 17.7 weeks last seen in 2003. This small nationwide improvement in access reflects waiting time decreases in 5 provinces, while concealing increases in waiting time in Manitoba, Ontario, New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, and Newfoundland.
Among the provinces, Ontario achieved the shortest total wait in 2005, 16.3 weeks, with Manitoba (16.6 weeks), and Alberta (16.8 weeks) next shortest. Saskatchewan, despite a dramatic 7.8 week reduction in the total wait time, exhibited the longest total wait, 25.5 weeks; the next longest waits were found in New Brunswick (24.5 Weeks) and Newfoundland (22.3 weeks).
Yes, the US Healthcare system has problems, but the Canadian system has some pretty huge gaps as well.
Oh, and you will die waiting for treatment and we don't have any modern equipment and the government will decide what treatment you can have and you can't pick your doctor in Canada.
fergus51
6,620 Posts
I can't believe you seriously think that would happen. Who do you think would stay in nursing for that? Nurses are needed, and people will pay us what they have to in order to get us to work. That's the case no matter who is paying our wages. How low can we go is already the motto in healthcare. I'm also single, so it isn't about me having another income to depend on. It's just common sense. In Canada, unions negotiate wages, just like they do here. No one is going to seriously propose paying a national salary. Even national companies have different salaries for the same job depending on location. The RCMP in Canada for instance are government employees, and don't even have the right to strike. They still get cost of living differences in their salaries and paid for OT even though the government has a monopoly on salaries.
The US will never have a national or universal health care system anyways so there is no point in really worrying about it, but I just have to respond when people present wild fears as fact when none of those fears have materialized in places that do have universal health care.