Readers Write: The nurses' strike, Donald Trump's re-election
There is a salary bidding war (for the execs).
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The nurses' strike exposes a salary conundrum that runs deeper than one might think ("Twin Cities, Duluth nurses begin strike," Sept. 13). On the surface, it appears that salaries of health care executives are grossly overpaid at the expense of the salaries of nurses and likely other health care employees, which is a reasonable observation. However, it's worthwhile to dig deeper to better understand how and why those executive salaries are as high as they are. If you happen to work in the human resources department of just about any industry in this country, you'd understand that a basic task of that department is to ensure employee retention, and that is typically dependent on providing competitive salaries, which includes the salaries of executives. The process of setting competitive salaries requires market comparison research. Focusing strictly on executive salaries, that research/data tends to produce unreasonably high salary levels, but one needs to recognize that the reason they're as high as they are is that they've been driven by years of competition among executives who are ready and willing to jump from industry to industry in order to grow their income. And, if their own motivation isn't enough incentive, there's always the headhunters who are lurking out there offering added incentives.
I definitely feel the pain of the nurses and can only hope that their respective human resource representatives find a way to bring the nurses' salaries to a level that matches the value they bring to their work, across the entire health care industry.
Patrick Bloomfield, Chisholm, Minn.
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The nursing strike will certainly send a message to hospital managements that nurses are most serious about their demands for adequate staff and 30% wage increases, as hiring short-term replacements will be quite costly and somewhat disruptive to operations. But what will happen after these three days if contract negotiations won't budge, and management still "can't afford" paying for full staffing at 30% higher wages?
Say the average nurse makes $42 per hour. Times that by 15,000 nurses and you get $630,000 per hour, at 40 hours a week for 52 weeks — it would be some $1.3 billion per year. To add 30% to that would be another $393 million per year, plus more to add staffing beyond the current levels. Either way, taxpayers and patients will eventually pay higher health insurance premiums and government services costs. This certainly does not bode well for any cost improvement to the costliest health care in the world.
Michael Tillemans, Minneapolis
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The commentary on behalf of Minnesota nurses ("Nurses are striking to put patients before profits," Opinion Exchange, Sept. 10) is about much more than the plight of nurses. The quote, "But today, this care model has been bought out and paved over by corporate health care chains run by executives focused on the bottom line," says it all. It speaks to the dysfunction of the entire American for-profit health care system in toto. "For profit" implies a free market where everyone has equal information. Does that sound like our system? Even if you do have some information, in the end your decision is out of your hands. If you're having a heart attack or seeking treatment for cancer you don't care about the doctor's Yelp rating or how much the hospital charges for aspirin, you just want to be fixed. And you will pay for it.
We are blessed in Minnesota with excellent health care. Up until the past few years our health care had mostly been provided through nonprofit organizations. This didn't mean "cheap" but it did mean that it took shareholders out of the equation — and from my 10 years working for the nation's largest for-profit health care company, nothing took precedence over shareholder value. Anyway, this also helped inhibit health care execs from pursuing exorbitant profits — and receiving eight-figure incomes. We should return to it and it would be an excellent model for the whole country to follow.
Unfortunately, this system doesn't alleviate the enormous overpaying we are stuck with for nearly all our care, from hospitals, to doctors, MRIs and pharmaceuticals. But it's a start.
In the meantime, I say to the nurses, "Go get 'em." You folks are the least of our problems!
D. Roger Pederson, Minneapolis
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The Minnesota Nurses Association highlights what's wrong with health care. The current strike shows that nursing can identify the issues with health care but fails to see the broader health care situation. Concerns about staffing, safety and pay are across all the allied health professions within the hospitals of Minnesota. Respiratory therapists, physical therapists, imaging staff, surgical techs and laboratory workers all are facing severe staffing shortages. The nursing union has done an amazing job of convincing the general public that they alone are responsible for patient care. This is not the case. Without all these allied health team members, patient care would fail.
We all are concerned about safety for staff as patients are becoming increasingly aggressive. The concern is the 30% wage increase over three years that is being asked for. The nursing budget for hospitals already accounts for the greatest percentage of care team wages, and nurses are asking for more while their colleagues in patient care lag behind. Anything more than what the hospitals propose for wages will have a limiting care impact throughout the hospitals. All those care teams behind the scenes will be limited and care will become slower and harder to provide. So when listening to what the nurses' union is saying, I hope the patients understand that in the end they will be the ones impacted the most because of this contract negotiation.
Travis Hayden, Clear Lake, Wis.
TRUMP RE-ELECTION
Those are the rules?
Since reading a recent news article in the Star Tribune explaining that only by identifying the Jan. 6 invasion of the Capitol as an "insurrection" could we possibly prevent former President Donald Trump from serving again if elected, I am finding disbelief when I share this information with friends and family ("Push is on to bar Trump from holding office," Sept. 8). Disqualification based on being a party to insurrection dates to the aftermath of the Civil War when Congress wanted to prevent losing separatists from holding federal office where they could undermine the union from inside. While in many states even released felons cannot vote, it is dumbfounding to learn that a U.S. president could govern from a prison cell.
Recent revelations in a book ("Holding the Line") by Geoffrey Berman, former U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, are a chilling warning of what a re-elected Trump would demand of his Department of Justice to exact revenge over political opponents and Republican defectors from MAGA orthodoxy. Berman describes how Attorney General William Barr sought, on President Donald Trump's behalf, to pin criminal charges on President Barack Obama's White House counsel, Gregory Craig, and former Secretary of State John Kerry. Berman, a Republican, refused to buckle, asserting there was no way that either man was guilty of a crime. Berman was fired.
Who knows what Trump did or did not do with the super-secret documents he allegedly took with him to Mar-a-Lago (and refused for months to voluntarily relinquish), but the prospect of him having legal possession of such information, along with control of the nuclear codes, would create a Blackmailer in Chief unconstrained by morals, ethics or common sense. An already fragile democracy would be unlikely to survive.
Bob Norberg, Lake City, Minn.
