Links are at the end, in the links circus.
“[A] handful of health care employees appeared in front of a judge to argue that it was appropriate for them to take jobs where they would make more money and be able to spend more time with their kids.”
This story from last year somehow escaped me. A Wisconsin health care system sued to stop some of its medical workers from taking jobs at a rival hospital, arguing, despite having spurned the opportunity to match salaries and benefits at the new jobs, that the employees were too valuable to lose while their employer was getting hammered with Covid cases.1
One of the employees wrote in a letter to the judge that they had received an “outstanding offer” from the other hospital that included better pay and benefits, along with a more reasonable work-life balance. Their colleagues also rushed to apply for a series of open jobs at Ascension. As was pointed out in their letter, the group approached the hospital in late December in the hopes of receiving a counteroffer but was told “the long term expense to ThedaCare was not worth the short term cost.” Another ThedaCare employee described being told by a manager that she’d receive communication about a retention bonus that never came. “I’ve given my life” to ThedaCare, she said. “They don’t care.” Or, as another put it somewhat more succinctly in court, “Nobody cared how magical what we do here was until today.”
Wisconsin is a right-to-work state, meaning employees have the right to work for substandard wages in bad conditions, and the medical workers in question were at-will employees, meaning they could be dismissed from the hospital at will and, theoretically, that they could leave the hospital at will.
But ThedaCare, the whinging employer, managed to convince a judge to impose a restraining order preventing the workers from reporting to their new jobs at the hospital ThedaCare was suing, leaving the workers in limbo until the order was lifted.
ThedaCare eventually dropped the suit and, perhaps from consideration of how the whole thing would look to prospective employees, released a conciliatory statement.
"We regret the seven team members who accepted positions outside of ThedaCare were impacted by this situation, and we have made efforts to ensure that the risk to them was minimized for the day between employment. We know the work of interventional radiology and cardiovascular nurses and technologists saves lives, and we wish them well in their new roles."2
The “situation,” again, being that ThedaCare was trying to force the workers to stay put by blocking them from working where they wanted to.
Much of the national coverage of the lawsuit looked at it as a symptom of medical provider woes inflicted by Covid,3 which it was in part, but the heart of the suit, again, was a company trying to retain employees against their will because their departures would cost it money and prestige.
That right there is a symptom of massive, massive, unearned entitlement, no matter what else was going on.
He wrote that the information had been “inadvertently omitted due to a misunderstanding of the filing instructions.”
Clarence Thomas, lying about either his capacity to fill out a form or his capacity to serve as a judge.4
Sure, he’s corrupt, but more than that he’s completely committed to a decades-long “fuck you” to anyone who cares about this stuff.
“The new study found that Black residents in counties with more Black physicians — whether or not they actually see those doctors — had lower mortality from all causes, and showed that these counties had lower disparities in mortality rates between Black and white residents.”
STAT News reports5 on the study just published in JAMA and accompanied by an editorial from one of the doctors who has reviewed it.6
While there is evidence to support potential mechanisms by which Black physicians working within the health care system can improve health outcomes for Black patients (eg, increased shared decision-making and patient-centered care, culturally concordant care, increased quality of care), there is also evidence that Black physicians are more likely than physicians from other racial or ethnic groups to engage in health-related work outside the health care system—that is, Black physicians are more likely to provide health-related expertise to local community organizations (eg, school boards, local media); to be politically involved in health-related matters at the local, state, or national level; and to encourage medical organizations to advocate public health (eg, air pollution, gun control, increased literacy, substance abuse prevention). This community involvement and advocacy by Black physicians may change the social drivers of health for the populations most vulnerable to their health effects.
Among the reasons the U.S. fares so poorly in comparison with our more civilized rich countries is the lack of universal health care and other comprehensive social welfare programs, which results in much worse outcomes for low-income people here. What the editorial suggests, among other things, is that Black physicians in impoverished counties are serving as substitutes for a functional welfare state.
Hoops everywhere. Suck it up, Clarence.
Music
I think all of these bands may be Irish. This is the second appearance from the definitely Irish Pillow Queens, whom I really like.
English Teacher, “Polyawkward;”7 Pillow Queens, "Leave the Light On;"8 Grandma's House, "Who Am I."9
That, Comrades, is all there is
There’s an entire generation going to be wiped out from a lack of socialism.
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Be well, take care.