[KantianBurke]

And the moral of this story is?

[marajade]

And if a hospital can't staff enough nurses does that mean they have to turn away patients?

[LaineyDee]

California ranks second to last among all states in terms of nurses per capita, Emerson said.

I hate to burst their bubble....but it isn't just staff/patient ratio that keeps nurses away....IT'S PAYOLA. I haven't had a pay raise in 5 years. What other industry would tolerate that?

[Faraday]

The consequences, "unintended" or not, are clear. An increase in costs, which the state, i.e. tax payers, will bear a large part of via Medicare and Medicaid. Insurance costs will increase to cover it as well. Marginal hospitals will close. Nurse wages may increase, but not necessarily. This is creeping Hillary Care and should be opposed. The government does not belong in the health care sector (except to ensure access to the most indigent). Social engineering to redirect social investment from other sectors to health care does not further liberty, but does further restrict it.

[unamused]

How 'bout taxpayer/flea ratios??
No taxpayer can be expected to support more that one parasite...
Naaahhh....never happen...
Politicians are all fleas....

[Holden Magroin]

Too bad most Californians are too stupid to see what is going on. The problem is that we have 3 million illegal aliens in this state who are overcrowding hospitals and don't pay taxes. But Red Davis and MALDEF insist that these "undocumented workers" be allowed to stay on the public dole at the expense of others becaue they add "diversity" to this state.

[DoughtyOne]

Interesting thread.  Boy have I waited years to participate on it.

Nurses.  I respect what you do.  I respect the fact that some of you are treated unfairly.  I respect the fact that you are required to do more than you have ever been required to do before.  But I have to tell you something.  Believe it or not, there are actually other people that work in hospitals besides you. They are also have to provide more services than every before. And here's how they see things.

In the late 1980s and early 1990s, hospitals came under extreme pressures to reduce their costs.  What startedout as the state and federal government refusing to pay for full services in the mid 1980s, spread to insurance industry concerns doing the same thing.  How would any of you like to provide a bill for services rendered only to have the purchaser inform you that they would only pay sixty cents on the dollar?  That's what the states and federal government did.  When the insurance industry did the same thing, hospitals were screwed.  During those times (and I'm going to refer to California hospitals since I have worked in them for close to thirty years) employees across the spectrum lost wages.  Some had their wages frozen.  Others took ten or twenty percent cuts and then had their wages frozen.  Others lost benefits.  At one point I went for seven years without a raise.  I know people who went as long as twelve with a raise.  During that period of time, guess who did get raises.  Yes, it was nursing.

California has had a severe nursing shortage for fifteen years that I know of.  I'm fairly confident the shortage extended beyond that point.  The problems with nursing is that a high number of nurses enter the field, then drop out.  Some surely do it for money.  But others do it because they get married, they find they don't like the work, they take positions elsewhere in the industry or something else comes up.

Too many positions and not enough nurses creates a situation where premium salaries exist.  Nurses, I'm not sure which state you're commenting from, but during the seven year period where other staff members didn't get raises in our hospital, our nurses got five of them.  Not only that our administrators never missed a chance to stroke the nurses.  National nursing day, aw we'll give them a boquet of roses and a health club membership.  First cloudy day in March, aw well give them a gift certificate to one of three restaurants.  Let me tell you how that looked to the rest of us.  We hadn't had raises in seven years and yet the nursing staff was not only getting raises, but bonuses to boot.

As for staffing shortages and the nursing patient ratios, some of you are being more than disingenuous.  The fact is, we've had to close certain units in our hospital because we couldn't find the personel that would work.  For years we had to hire in registry nurses who would only do the work for two times the wages of a normal nurse, a premium on top of that being paid to the registry.  A lot of nurses work full time for registries.  They get double the pay and no benefits.  That may sound bad, but if the spouse has medical, they don't need the benefits anyway.  These nurses will pick up two to three shifts per week and make as much or more money that they did working full time.  And this adds to the nursing shortage.  And what's more, you know this ladies.

Let me tell you another little story.  At one point I was hospitalized with blood clots in my legs.  This created a situation where I was bed ridden and very weak.  At one point I had to ask the nurse to help me get on the bed pan.  After about fifteen minutes I started buzzing the nurse to return, because the bed pan was cutting into me.  It was quite painful and I could not move off of it.  At 45 minutes my wife came on the unit to visit.  I was in total agony when she entered the room.  She helped me. Then she wheeled around and went to the nurses station.  There she found all the nurses on the unit having pizza.

I have personally had nurses attempt to start the wrong I.V. on me.  I have had ones that were so lame that I had to help them start an I.V. on myself.  Sorry ladies.  I appreciate you stories, but you're being quite sellective in your grief.

You guys do a great job for the most part.  What you do is important and you are the front lines.  Some of you are brilliant at what you do.  To those of you who are treated unfairly, I sympathize.  I just wanted to express the view that there are more things at work than some of you intimated.

[JustTheTruth]

Here we go again - government screwing around big-time with the market for labor. What a gift to the California Nurses Association! As if Gov. gray-out hadn't already totally screwed up the energy market in California - with huge, long-term negative financial impacts on taxpayers - here he goes again with this doozy . . .

Socialists in America refuse to learn from their experiences; another definition for insanity.

Does anybody know the average RN salary in California? It is probably close to $60,000 per year not counting overtime and shift-differentials and decent benefits. Tough job? Yes, but you don't necessarily even need a 4 year degree to be one . . .

Valuable profession? Incredibly so . . .

However, unsafe hospitals already get sued big time when they screw up. This isn't about patient safety, it is about political payback.

We are in the nation's biggest nursing shortage in history, and Governor Gray-out pushes up the "demand" curve dramatically - while the Supply of nurses is relatively inelastic. As any idiot knows, this is a recipe for a huge shortage in supply, a huge price increase, and still no more nurses for years to come. California will just swipe nurses from other states and keep pushing up the price. More hospitals will close, especially those that are not "in it for the money" - those that care for the poor and uninsured. Those hospitals are already reeling financially, and guess what the solution will be? Yup, government bail outs and prop-ups.

Davis is such a fool.

Too many posters are blaming hospitals - but get real, most hospitals in this country are losing money . . . Their largest payers are the Federal and State governments which guarantee huge levels of benefits to those "insured" by the tax payer, and then the government refuses to pay the full cost of those services to providers. Providers then must try to charge paying customers more to make up for it, and this just becomes a hidden tax on the insured (the taxpayer). Gov. Davis & co. are only going to make a nursing shortage problem worse, make the nurses more militant in their demands (what do you say about a nurse who leaves a neonatal intensive care unit full of babies to go on strike for higher wages)? I wish I could say that California deserves what it got for electing Davis, but they do not deserve it, despite the bad election decision.

[Psycho_Bunny]

What's the State going to do, if this passes, and medical costs shoot up.

"Doh! We didn't see THAT coming."

Idiots. Hopefully, CA will go bankrupt sooner rather than later, so the rest of the nation can see what the results of socialism truly are.