When the New York Times wrote recently about the “Future Face of Health Care,” the system the paper singled out for consideration was California’s Kaiser Permanente.
“When people talk about the future of health care, Kaiser Permanente is often the model they have in mind,” read the lede of Reed Abelson’s story March 20, 2013.
With its network of hospitals and ostensibly non-profit insurance plan, Kaiser’s “the kind of holistic health system that President Obama’s health care law encourages.”
Unfortunately the people “talking” in Abelson’s story included no California nurses. They have Kaiser on their on their minds, too, it turns out, but in a very different way.
“Kaiser’s a great model of cutting costs,” Bonnie Castillo, legislative director of the California Nurses Association told GRITtv. If current trends at Kaiser are any indication, she says, the future includes fewer, more overworked nurses with less time with patients and more robotic doctors, taking vital signs via remote.
Kaiser CEO George C. Halvorson told the Times, that “the way to get costs lower to move care farther and farther from the hospital setting.” Sounds innocent enough. (For the record, Kaiser Foundation Health Plan and Kaiser Foundation Hospitals reported a combined $1.6 billion in net income last year.) In practice, Kaiser’s cost-cutting initiatives include attractive aspects like a state of the art website packed with information that can take the place of doctor’s visits, but also more emphasis on out-patient care (which has already raised concerns of CA state regulators), more electronic record keeping (a computerized system prescribed a potentially fatal dose for a county jail inmate in Contra Costa last year) and more doctoring via the internet.
The California Nurses Association (which, with the National Union of Healthcare Workers has mounted several short strikes at Kaiser facilities in the last few years) has already raised concerns about the “doc bots” that are showing up in some California hospitals.
“Problems with the machines might be a surprise to the consultants and industry executives, not to mention to the politicians who enacted financial incentives to promote rapid expansion of medical technology as key components of the Affordable Care Act,” wrote National Nurses United director RoseAnn DeMoro recently, “But nurses have long been aware of the downsides for quality care and human healthcare employment.”
Intensive care nurse, Michael Hill told GRITtv that he’s seen nursing change dramatically over his two-decade career as nurses spend more time attending to technology and less to patients.
At the end of the day, who do you want at your bedside, asked Castillo, “A nurse or a computer screen?”
To give you a glimpse of what she’s talking about, here’s a picture of the first FDA approved robot doctor, a machine created by iRobot, the same company that made your Roomba vacuum cleaner. Think that nurses deserve a place in health care reporting? We do.
We’re not backing down in the face of Trump’s threats.
As Donald Trump is inaugurated a second time, independent media organizations are faced with urgent mandates: Tell the truth more loudly than ever before. Do that work even as our standard modes of distribution (such as social media platforms) are being manipulated and curtailed by forces of fascist repression and ruthless capitalism. Do that work even as journalism and journalists face targeted attacks, including from the government itself. And do that work in community, never forgetting that we’re not shouting into a faceless void – we’re reaching out to real people amid a life-threatening political climate.
Our task is formidable, and it requires us to ground ourselves in our principles, remind ourselves of our utility, dig in and commit.
As a dizzying number of corporate news organizations – either through need or greed – rush to implement new ways to further monetize their content, and others acquiesce to Trump’s wishes, now is a time for movement media-makers to double down on community-first models.
At Truthout, we are reaffirming our commitments on this front: We won’t run ads or have a paywall because we believe that everyone should have access to information, and that access should exist without barriers and free of distractions from craven corporate interests. We recognize the implications for democracy when information-seekers click a link only to find the article trapped behind a paywall or buried on a page with dozens of invasive ads. The laws of capitalism dictate an unending increase in monetization, and much of the media simply follows those laws. Truthout and many of our peers are dedicating ourselves to following other paths – a commitment which feels vital in a moment when corporations are evermore overtly embedded in government.
Over 80 percent of Truthout‘s funding comes from small individual donations from our community of readers, and the remaining 20 percent comes from a handful of social justice-oriented foundations. Over a third of our total budget is supported by recurring monthly donors, many of whom give because they want to help us keep Truthout barrier-free for everyone.
You can help by giving today. Whether you can make a small monthly donation or a larger gift, Truthout only works with your support.