Kaiser Strike Symptom of Health Care Firms' 'Unholy Alliance' With US Government

Staff at US health care giant Kaiser Permanente have walked out in a dispute over pay and contracts. Economist Mark Frost and Dr John Dombrowski, CEO of the Washington Pain Center and a practicing physician in the capital, said problems ran deeper than the immediate grievances.

Some 75,000 employees of private medical firm Kaiser Permanente walked out on Wednesday in the biggest single health care strike in US history.

Staff, represented by a coalition of unions, are angry at the company's below-inflation pay offer, its attempt to force them into a new contract which slashes their bonuses and with chronic understaffing, among other disputes.

Economist Mark Frost told Sputnik that the health care sector, which benefits from the federal Medicaid and Medicare programs, was not a free market.

"What you actually have is a microcosm of a fascist economy. You have this unholy alliance between government and between nonprofits and then for-profits," Frost said.

"If the anti-trust laws were applied to the medical world, think of all the conglomerates that we have and all of the unholy alliance is between the pharmaceutical companies and between the health care companies who have become monopoly buyers of medical personnel."

He said doctors were forced to do business with big players in the US health care market.

"You have to play the game or you're not going to get any patients, because it's the insurance companies now that actually provide the marketing that is the customer-acquisition cost of their business," Frost pointed out. "Every physician that I talk to... they're all resentful of the big insurance companies. Even my own insurance company just got busted not long ago for overcharging Medicare."

Washington, DC, based physician Dr John Dombrowski told Sputnik that the strike was unsurprising when worker were "getting crushed by inflation."

"We have over 10 percent inflation. Gas has gone up. Food has gone up. Health care has gone up, insurance has gone up," he said. "We just cannot live. We're living paycheck to paycheck."

He said nurses were overworked to the point of "burnout".

"That means you're not really getting the best care provided. Is that nurse going to really be do that extra step to make sure that you're safe, that you're getting the right medication, the right route, the right dose, everything?" Dombrowski warned. "This is where mistakes start to happen. When mistakes start to happen in people's lives become at risk."

He pointed out that it takes four years to train a nurse, which is increasingly undermined by "the leakage of people saying: 'you know what, I'm fed up, I'm leaving'."

"I've seen medicine now for almost 30 years, and I've seen it kind of devolve," Dombrowski explained. "It used to be very community-centered. Now it's kind of corporate. It's like you are a corporate cog and if you don't like it, somebody else will."

"With that kind of attitude, I really don't feel a lot of love and fuzziness," he said, adding that the like-it-or-leave-it attitude shown by management "really makes the employee feel less valued."

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