News of the Month: December 2018
Our Kaiser strike generated 787 television news reports and well over 100 print and web stories. Here are reports from the Santa Rosa Press Democrat, KTVU, USA Today, KQED and the Los Angeles Times.
Several newspapers including the Bakersfield Californian and the San Jose Mercury News also printed opinion pieces by our members:
Becker’s Hospital Review ranked the Kaiser action as the nation’s biggest hospital strike of 2018. Our strike at Providence Tarzana ranked fifth.
One week after the Kaiser strike, the Sacramento Bee reported on Kaiser filing a class action lawsuit accusing Kaiser of forcing people with severe mental illnesses requiring that they stay in residential treatment centers to cancel their Kaiser coverage and sign up for taxpayer-funded Medi-Cal.
The California Department of Public Health has given Eureka’s St. Joseph Hospital a pair of “deficiencies,” reprimanding the facility for using restraints on bed-ridden patients rather than employing less-restrictive methods, such bedside caregivers, the Lost Coast Outpost reports. Workers had called attention to the use of restraints earlier this year when the hospital laid off about two dozen workers including those specially trained to sit with at-risk patients.
In a poll released last week, the Public Policy Institute of California found that 57 percent of likely voters believe universal health care — which does not necessarily mean a single-payer system, just that all Californians are covered — should be either a very high or high priority for incoming Gov. Gavin Newsom, Capitol Public Radio reports.