In late March, the Minnesota Nurses Association (MNA)—which represents around 22,000 nurses in Minnesota and across the Upper Midwest—released a report about the reasons nurses are leaving their jobs and perhaps the field of nursing altogether.
In “Why We Left: 2022 Workforce Nursing Report,” nurses share disturbing stories of being pushed to their physical and emotional limits while on the job. MNA surveyed 748 nurses who left their jobs during the past two years and did not take a similar position in another facility with union representation.
Taxpayer dollars are helping pump up the bottom line for private health insurance providers, even as health care facilities claim they are so starved of resources that they can’t afford to adequately staff their facilities or pay frontline workers a living wage.
One nurse with forty years on the job says she was told by management to spend as little time with patients as possible—a move that left her in tears at the end of each shift. Another nurse, who is new to the field but made the decision to leave, describes feeling “overwhelmed and underappreciated.”
The report was presented at the Minnesota state capitol on March 31, as lawmakers are navigating this year’s legislative session. That’s a task that includes figuring out how to handle a budget surplus of more than $9 billion.
Republican leaders want to give the money back to Minnesota residents in the form of permanent tax cuts. Democrats, under the leadership of Governor Tim Walz, who is up for re-election in 2022, have proposed a range of redistribution ideas, from one-time rebate checks worth $500 per person to a substantial increase in education spending.
Still, according to the report, the main reason nurses left their jobs is not money or even COVID-19. Instead, at the top of the list was hospital management practices that sound like austerity measures.
Nurses say they are being stretched to the breaking point by requirements to move more quickly from patient to patient, while scrambling to find required on-the-job tools. MNA officials say the pandemic has provided useful cover for profit-minded health care providers. As COVID-19 ramped up in Minnesota, the chronic understaffing of hospitals and nursing homes that many say has existed for years became a more serious problem.
Instead of investing more fully in improving the wages and working conditions of permanent staffers, health care providers in Minnesota and throughout the nation have sunk money into the hiring of temporary traveling nurses who typically command exorbitant salaries.
MNA’s release of its workforce report was followed just days later by a very rosy earnings report from UnitedHealth Group, the nation’s largest health insurance provider which is based in a suburb of Minneapolis.
An April 14 Star Tribune report indicates that UnitedHealth raked in more than $5 billion in profits during the first quarter of 2022, which amounts to a late-2021 growth spurt for the company of around 6 percent. That is more than analysts and even UnitedHealth forecasters were expecting.
A main source of this influx in earnings is an increased demand for the company’s Medicare Advantage plans, which allow seniors to receive government-funded health care through private outfits such as UnitedHealth.
In essence, taxpayer dollars are helping pump up the bottom line for private health insurance providers like UnitedHealth, even as health care facilities claim they are so starved of resources that they can’t afford to adequately staff their facilities or pay frontline workers a living wage.
Situations like this have led progressive commentator Thom Hartmann to declare Medicare Advantage a “for-profit scam.” In a 2021 article for Common Dreams, Hartmann, who also wrote a book on this subject, notes that accountability is a major problem when it comes to tracking how the federal government’s money is being spent by private health insurance providers.
The government audits just a scant few of the hundreds of plans now available on the health care market, Hartmann says. Companies like UnitedHealth Group are paid a bulk amount for the services and plans they provide to consumers, making it harder to track the actual cost of health care.
We do know, however, that the money being spent is not trickling down to nurses and other essential health care workers.
On April 12, the University of Minnesota School of Public Health announced it had joined forces with AmeriCorps to create Minnesota Public Health Corps, a new program to address critical staffing shortages.
But the program appears to be little more than a short-term fix to a much deeper problem. Essentially, it involves hiring short-term workers at minimum wage to work full-time in understaffed health care facilities across the state, in exchange for a possible path into full-time, licensed positions—at one’s own expense, of course. (Those who complete a year of service in the program will receive a one-time tuition or student loan repayment stipend of $6,495.)
For now, nurses in Minnesota have won a temporary victory. A provision known as the Keeping Nurses at the Bedside Act has been included in the health omnibus bill that recently passed the Minnesota House.
Unlike the newly announced public health corps, which will rely on underpaid temporary workers, this act would provide a more robust level of support for nurses, including limits on how many patients they would be required to care for during their shifts.
Whether this provision will pass the Republican-controlled state senate remains to be seen, however. Either way, privatized outfits like UnitedHealth Group will likely keep amassing more and more publicly subsidized profits—at the expense of both workers and those in need of health care.