Biden's NLRB is making it easier for workers' unions to run the show. No need for pesky elections if there is a belief that a majority supports unionizing.
Peace Health Hospital in Eugene is the city's only hospital, and it's shutting down. Financial reasons. People will have to go to the hospital of neighboring city, Springfield, but it's more inconvenient. Nursing jobs will be lost, and maybe some hospitalist positions. This may be the first of the dominoes to fall. Legacy Systems is trying to merge with OHSU to avoid the same fate.
Speaking of which, OHSU's nursing union spokesperson says that proposed hospital security policy includes this:
OHSU denies that they said this, but who knows? And once the merger takes place, I suspect the nurses will have much less leverage in making demands.Youngman said nurses would be responsible, under OHSU’s proposal, for patting down and disarming patients, while ONA wants those tasks to be handled by trained security staff only.
Lahaina, two weeks later. Not much has changed.
Huh? You get a diagnosis of cancer, and now your choices might be to take a severe financial hit, or die soon. Liz Weston suggests a honest discussion with the doctor about how much treatment will extend life. The truth is, the doctor can't really know with the desired accuracy. There are too many variables, and all the doctor can do is look at the literature and see what was reported, and make a best guess. But there may be other treatments that the doctor is not aware of, including clinical trials. Sometimes people do better than you would expect. But sometimes, just looking at numbers and deciding to forego therapy is deeply unsettling. And when you see insurance companies (and their executive) make obscene amounts of money, it is easy to wonder why money is going towards their mansions and expensive cars instead of giving you a shot at a longer life. While pooling risk can be a way to defray the cost of treatment to an individual facing huge expenses, one must recognize that it is a middle-man entity, which controls the physician-patient interaction. We need consumer-owned policies, not employer-owned policies, and more competition.
Some thoughts about Studio Ghibli and Hayao Miyazaki. Most of Miyazaki's films are about capturing the essence of life in Japan, a land steeped in mysticism, and how it interacts with the issues of more modern life.