News of the month: NUHW members fighting layoffs in Santa Rosa
The Santa Rosa Press Democrat reported on Santa Rosa Memorial Hospital announcing layoffs, which would include 35 NUHW members, even though the hospital raked in a $55 million last year. The hospital is offering to forgo laying off 28 nursing assistants, but only if all 150 nursing assistants agree to go from a 40 hour/week schedule to a 36 hour/week schedule that would result in a pay cut for our members and less care for their patients.
Amid two high-profile suicides last week, the CDC issued a report Thursday showing that suicide rates rose in all but one state between 1999 and 2016, with increases seen across age, gender, race and ethnicity, NPR reports. In more than half of all deaths in 27 states, the people had no known mental health condition when they ended their lives.
In its latest effort to undermine the Affordable Care Act — and in the process, raise premiums for many Americans — the Trump administration is urging a federal judge in Texas to throw out the law’s protections for people with preexisting conditions, according to the Los Angeles Times. In other words, the administration wants insurers to be able to deny coverage to the people most in need of it, or to charge them considerably higher premiums than they’re allowed to charge today.
With $127.2 million in fines for wage theft, Tenet Healthcare ranked 10th on the list from Good Jobs First, a Washington-based organization that tracks legal violations at large companies.
CBS News reported that the House on Friday voted 396 to 14 to send the Senate more than 50 bills aimed at tackling the opioid crisis, which is claiming more than 115 lives each day in the U.S. The bills, nearly all of which were bipartisan, were wrapped into a single package, named the SUPPORT for Patients and Communities Act (H.R. 6). They aim to study the crisis and treatment efforts, increase treatment options and bed space, aid the development of non-addictive pain treatments, fight trafficking of counterfeit and illicit drugs, and more.