Thousands of NYC home healthcare workers have gone on a three-day strike for better wages, leaving thousands of infirm, elderly and bedridden patients alone without food, medication or bathing.
I am torn on this. On the one hand, home healthcare workers are horribly paid and have little if anything in the way of benefits. Most of them are low-income, low-education and frequently non-English speaking, as they are the only people who are willing to fill these jobs. I can attest from personal experience that too many of them (OK, the ones I had contact with) are untrained and totally incompetent. Better wages and benefits would bring a more educated and motivated group of people into the field.
On the other hand, how can you leave a paralyzed or elderly person on her own, hungry and without medicqtion?! From the Times: “The walkout left some patients angry and many upset. Miguelina Guerra, a 26-year-old paraplegic who lives in the South Bronx, said her aide did not show up as usual at 9 a.m. to take her to the shower. ‘It was horrible,’’ said Ms. Guerra, who lost the use of her legs in a motor vehicle accident. ‘Imagine being wet from head to toe. My clothes are usually full of urine by the morning.’ Ms. Guerra said she had urged her regular aide not to join the strike. ‘I told her, ‘You can’t do this,’ ‘’ she said. " ‘We’re not animals, we’re human.’’”
From the workers: “Standing near the stage, Susan Brown, a mother of three who earns $6.79 an hour after five years as a home care aide, said: ‘The pay’s no good. You can’t do nothing with it.’”
Actually (at least in New York), doctors, cops and firefighters can’t strike. It’s illegal under the Taylor laws.
The reason why the jobs pay that little is because there are people willing to work for those wages. These workers know that if they all quit en masse, there are plenty of others who would be willing to take their jobs. Otherwise, they’d have more leverage.
It is sad that they are paid so little for the work that they do. I know that many of these workers are hard workers who put in many hours caring for the elderly and/or infirm. However, it is simply a matter of supply and demand. Short of the government stepping in and demanding an increase in wages (and I don’t know how feasible, practical or legal that is), I don’t know a way to force the companies that hire HHA to give them a better wage.
As long as the only hardship being experienced by the people who are lacking care is degredation and discomfort, I’m in favor of the health care worker’s strike. I think that doing what they do for what they make is just as much a hardship as living in piss-soaked clothes for a while.
Of course, if their wages rise it will mean that less people will ultimately get at-home care, so other alternatives will need to be found. I have no idea what those are, though.
Couldn’t the government indirectly do this by instituting licensing requirements for home caretakers? That would decrease the supply, which would increase their wages.
It would help tremendously if insurance companies would offer higher reimbursement rates for home health services, or else cover these services. Not all do, and the ones that do have restrictions on who can qualify for reimbursement.
I’ve also worked with people who worked in home health care, and you wouldn’t believe the burnout rate. One of my coding school classmates left home health after she badly injured her back lifting a patient. The patient was quite heavy (~150 lbs, IIRC) for one person to manage alone, and my classmate did not have access to a Hoyer lift or to a backbrace. Others left because of the low pay, sometimes demeaning tasks, and lack of respect.
It’s a hard job with few rewards. I don’t blame the workers for striking.
Except a lot of people will have to go three days w/o life-sustaining medications and food (I’m sure a lot of them are hurriedly arranging alternate care, but some will fall through the cracks).
Part of the problem here, however, is that the people who are most affected by the strike are the ones who have the least power to change the HHA’s fate.
If I strike from my job, my employer would have to do without my services. No one (other than my employers) would really be affected. However, in this case, the elderly and the infirm are not the ones paying the wages of the HHA; it’s either the local municipality or insurance companies. The elderly/infirm have no way to affect the wages of the HHAs at all, but they are the ones being denied necessary services.
Licensing HHAs might be a solution, but even that won’t make everyone happy. No doubt many of the HHAs would look at licensing as an extra expense that they cannot afford.
A thousabd people calling 911 because they can’t find their meds or haven;t eaten in a day? That would work. And I’m not sure what you mean by “If they have a home health care worker, they should have either insurance or means to pay.” Some of this is covered by Medicare/Medicaid, some of it isn’t. Are you saying if you can’t afford insurance, you should just die?
I imagine they’d do triage–not having eaten in a day probably isn’t life threatening, meds might be. It would certainly put a strain on the emergency medical system, but that’s kind of the point: the patients won’t die, and it’ll put some pressure on the city to resolve the strike.
:smack: No. I’m saying that having to make a trip to the ER via 911 isn’t going to bankrupt them.
But isn’t that the decision American society has made with it’s health care system constructed on an ability to pay basis?
I mean, what we’re seeing here is upfront and in-your-face examples of ‘Of course we have rationing of health care in America. It’s just done by price instead of government’.
Sure, emergency rooms can’t turn people away. But that doesn’t mean the people who go to them get good care.
Exactly. And neither are the home healthcare workers. It’s profitable for the company to pay them $6.79 an hour, profitable for the company to hire people with minimum or no training and provide little else in that vein, and profitable for the company to drop an injured healthcare worker and hire a new one, even if the injury occurred as a result of unacceptable working conditions (like MsRobyn’s friend).
Who should the patients be angry at, however? Their healthcare workers for striking? Or the HHAs for shelling out such low pay, providing such substandard training, and enforcing physically injurious job conditions that the home workers felt they had no choice but to strike in order to try to ameliorate their collective situation? I understand the strike will make life difficult for the patients, but what the home healthcare workers need to make clear is that a succesful strike will have the direct benefit of improving the patients’ quality of care. They need to emphasize that this will benefit both worker and patient and actively seek patients’ support in the strike. If the HHAs can successfully play the patients against the healthcare workers, portraying the strikers as completely selfish and indifferent to their patients’ situation (I’ve seen similar tactics used in teachers’ strikes both actual and threatened here in DC), it will demoralize the healthcare workers and increase the chance that the strike will fail. And the healthcare workers end up the worse for it.
Your ambivalence towards the strike because of the patients’ point of view is understandable, Eve. But it’s the wrong perspective.
Having just gone through a bout with home health care with my father-in-law, I feel for both sides. My mother-in-law was pleased with one or two of the workers, a couple were just OK, and a few were horrible. This problem wasn’t as prevalent before, but because people are living longer, the need for these workers has increased drastically.
It’s a crappy (literally!) job. The workers need to answer questions constantly, do extremely physical work, put up with less-than-pleasant patients, play priest and psychiatrist to the family, and all this for the same money a kid makes at Micky D’s. It’s no wonder the turnover is high and the help is sub-standard.
This is just another of many problems with the healthcare system in the U.S. I don’t know what the answer is, but we need to find one as all the baby boomers start moving into the years when their health begins to fail. You think the system is flooded now? Baby, you ain’t seen nothin’ yet.
Other countries have socialized medicine. I certainly wouldn’t want to be the one who has to figure out the logistics of THAT with the huge number of people who would need it in the U.S.! We need to make the industry more attractive. We need better training, better wages, more workers…all of this means more money (more taxes). If I knew my tax dollars would be allocated responsibly to an expanded healthcare program, you betchyerass I’d be happy to pay it. I guess we’ll have to wait and see what happens…something’s got to change fast.
. It must be a different cup of tea in America, then. Careworkers here, get paid about double as what your careworkers get. But no-one wants to be a careworker here. Too hard work, you know.
Eve, Good luck on this. It’s terrible to see the old and sick being neglected.
I haven’t decided if I want to go peacefully in a nice patch of forest, or as a fireball in direct proximity of someone I carry intense dislike for. Hmmmmmm…
I have a few points in regards to the comments about calling 911.
First of all, call triage only happens when there’s more calls pending than there are ambulances available. How often that already happens in NYC I have no idea. Otherwise, though, calls are answered in the order received.
Second, just because someone has insurance doesn’t mean that their insurance will pay for an ambulance trip if it’s not medically necessary. Running out of medication does not necessitate a trip to the ER. Neither does not eating. However, at least in my system, we have to take anyone who calls to the ER. We don’t have field initiated refusals, and any pt refusals have to be ok’d by an ER doc. So we’d have all sorts of people getting ambulance bills (BLS ~$500, plus mileage, plus supplies) and ER charges that their insurance won’t pay for.
Lastly, “putting some strain on the system” wouldn’t begin to describe it. Most EMS systems are under a great deal of “strain” on a regular basis. Were even some of these pts to start calling 911 for these issues, we’d be seeing a total system collapse.