Another great podcast featuring Rose Roach, executive director of the Minnesota Nurses Association:
Who and what gets left out when health care is driven by profit? How does “lean model management” affect public health preparedness? Code WACK! host Brenda Gazzar and Rose Roach compare racial inequities in Minnesota and the rest of the nation. Plus, what’s the cost of the perverse incentives implicit in our for-profit healthcare system?
Listen to the podcast!
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Healthy Profits or Healthy People? America’s Choice
—– TRANSCRIPT —–
Opening MUSIC – “Talk Back” 10 seconds, fade down
Welcome to Code WACK!, your podcast on America’s broken healthcare system and how Medicare for All could help. I’m your host Brenda Gazzar. Today, we’ll talk about why our healthcare system is a liability, especially amid a pandemic.
Rose Roach is the executive director of the Minnesota Nurses Association, an affiliate of National Nurses United.
Welcome to Code WACK!, Rose.
Roach: Thank you for having me.
Q: We’ve seen nationally that the coronavirus pandemic disproportionately affects African Americans. Has that been what the data is showing in Minnesota — and how is that playing out on the ground?
Roach: Well it’s pretty much playing out here like it is in the rest of the country. So Minnesota has a population of 5.5 million. Eighty-four percent of the population in Minnesota is White and as of last Thursday (early June) the Minnesota Department of Health reported that there were 9,000 confirmed covid cases amongst White Minnesotans. Eight percent of our population is Black and yet the (Minnesota) Department of Health reports that 6,000 confirmed cases are in the Black communities so again the data points really to the inequities in our healthcare system that can only be solved as we all know by a single-payer Medicare-For-All type system. Right now, we’re seeing where hospitals and health clinics are built in rich, White communities that are profit centers for big corporations whereas under a Medicare-for-All type system, health clinics and hospitals are built based on the health needs of the community through regional health planning so community clinics can provide that easy access to primary care which improves health outcomes and a single-payer system is really the only way we’re going to get to a place where we can begin to really honestly deal with and remove racial disparities in our healthcare system.
Q: Hmmm. So are you noticing any other racial or ethnic groups being affected more than others?
Roach: Well we are seeing a pretty high number of cases impacted in the Asian community. We just yesterday (early June) lost a 31-year old. She was actually a member of the Saint Paul City School District School Board.
We’re also seeing a pretty high level within the American Indian/Native American community as well.
Q: Uh uh, and what do you attribute that to primarily?
Roach: It continues to be just the system overall. We do not put an emphasis on health care needs where there are actual healthcare needs. We build around profit centers, where there is density where there is a belief that you have private payers, meaning usually folks that have health insurance through an employer-based system and therefore the reimbursement rates for the clinics, for the hospitals are much higher than they are through our public health system and so therefore as you look at all of the various social determinants of health, be it poverty, be it environmental situations, affordable or unaffordable housing — they all contribute to our health and disproportionately people of color are impacted by all of those particular structures, which therefore lead to worsening health conditions and then we don’t actually finance and put healthcare clinics and hospitals where they need to be which ends up causing these types of disparities.
Q: Thank you, Rose. Hundreds of healthcare workers, including nurses, have died in the pandemic so far. Why is that and what can be done about it?
Roach: Well, you’re exactly right. There are. I think the last number that I saw was over 600 healthcare workers in the country have died from COVID-19 that’s not just nurses — that’s frontline healthcare workers overall. Here in Minnesota we have not yet to our knowledge lost a nurse although just late last week an SEIU (Service Employees International Union) union sister who was a lab technician died of COVID and we lost a union brother, Armando Salas, a janitor at U.S. Bank Plaza in Downtown Minneapolis, who also died of the disease. We know in New York, our sister union — the New York State Nurses Association, NYSNA — has lost many nurses and various workers in New York due to COVID. And there’s just a whole lot to be said about the lack of any real leadership in D.C. right now and the outcome would certainly be improved if we had anyone providing coherent guidance and direction to the states.
I would also note that the CDC, the Centers for Disease Control, of course, rolled back standards on the personal protective equipment/ PPE and as such, they did that not based on any scientific data or evidence. They did it based on the fact that we are short in supply and the question becomes why are we short in supplies on things as critical as PPE, particularly during the time of a global pandemic. And the answer is because health care gets run like a business instead of like a healthcare system so you end up in a situation where they’re implementing what they call these just-in-time or lean model management, which means nothing more than you have the least amount of staff, the least amount of equipment to maximize the most you can out of profit. You can’t run a healthcare system like that and we’re experiencing that right now in the midst of a global pandemic.
Thank you, Rose.
Find more Code WACK! episodes at ProgressiveVoices.com and on the PV app. You can also listen at heal-ca.org. This podcast is powered by HEAL California, uplifting the voices of those fighting for healthcare reform around the country. I’m Brenda Gazzar.
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