Like it or not, politics matters — a lot. Elected officials at every level of government pass budgets and laws that profoundly affect our lives. Healthcare is far from immune. Just think about our efforts to win a statewide safe staffing law, funding for public hospitals, and the fact that thousands...
Whether or not history one day considers the Affordable Care Act (ACA) a victory for patients or insurance companies depends, in part, on what we do next.
The Affordable Care Act’s healthcare exchanges began selling insurance plans on October 1 — and already big...
The nationwide trend of hospital consolidation has sparked controversy about the potential long-term effect on healthcare costs. Hospital consolidations are already having unexpected consequences in upstate New York, where 68 percent of all hospitals (outside of the New York City metropolitan area)...
There’s no time to hang back and rest on our recent progress. We stopped the full-on assault on healthcare in 2013. But we have not won — yet. This year we’re upping our ante in every fight and pushing even harder to bring home a safe staffing law and strong contracts, and to keep Wall Street out of...
I’m writing this shortly before the NYSNA convention, which will conclude with our newly elected board taking office. We’ve had a remarkable year. Literally thousands of NYSNA members stepped up and got involved in the fight for safe staffing and quality healthcare for all New Yorkers.
The story of how we kept LICH and Interfaith open is a story of dedication, commitment — and how changing our union has given us the power to stop hospital closures.
Since 2000, 28 hospitals have closed across our state. As the new NYSNA, we’ve vowed to stop this.
By Julie Semente, RN, Secretary, LICH Executive Committee
Last January, we opened the morning newspaper and found out that SUNY planned to close LICH, the hospital where I’ve helped save lives for 30 years. I immediately knew the effort that would have to be put forth to fight for LICH’s life...
Anti-union politicians and business interests are out to destroy our public hospitals. And they’ve got a strategy:
1. PRIVATIZE.
Hospital executives in Massena, near the Canadian border, are trying to fully privatize the town hospital. In the 1990s, Rudy Giuliani tried the same with HHC hospitals...
Professor Wade Hill is an RN with a Ph.D. in Public Health. He teaches and researches at the College of Nursing at Montana State University. His specialties include the health effects of climate change and the leading role nurses should play in addressing the climate crisis...
In September, 200 of NYSNA’s public sector nurses from every part of the state came together for our first-ever conference dedicated specifically to sharing our experiences and strategizing our next steps in fighting the attack on public hospitals.
When you look beyond the homeless, among them 20,000 children in New York City alone, beyond the hardship of elderly women from whom $75 in monthly food stamps – a week’s groceries – was “sequestered” away this year, and look past smoldering forests where...
