Utah Med Law

The New York Times reported that a hospital network in Albany agreed to pay $1.25 million to settle a class action antitrust claim that hospitals an the area had illegally conspired to artificially hold nursing wages at low levels.  The hospitals maintain that they are admitting no guilt and are merely settling the claim to stop "wasting" their meager resources on litigation. 

Do you think that these conspiracy cases are limited to the big cities in the East?   Not so!  In 1994 in United States v. Utah Society for Healthcare Human Resources Admin., et al. the Federal Trade Commission alleged a violation of § 1 of the Sherman Act designed to stop defendants -- Utah Society for Healthcare Human Resources Administration ("USHHRA"), a professional association of hospital human resource directors in Utah; and nine named hospitals in the Salt Lake County, Utah, area, all of whose human resource directors belong to USHHRA -- from continuing their conspiracy to exchange non-public prospective and current information about overall budgets, nursing budgets, and entry level wages for registered nurses.  In other words the human resource directors of he Salt Lake County hospitals were charged with conspiring to keep entry wages of nurses low.  There are many like cases across the nation.

Free trade and economic Darwinism is good for their proponents but this is free enterprise run amok.  When wages for any given occupation are held artificially low less people are attracted to that occupation.  Not rocket science.  When nursing wages are kept artificially low less people consider nursing as an occupation.  The result is predictible.  There is a shortage of nursing personnel to care for people.  The cause for the shortage is blamed on everything else except the real cause - poor wages.  Who is to blame?  Not the hospitals and their unscrupulous administrators because they are simply doing what they are able to do - even it means braking the law.  Who is to blame?  Nurses - that's who!

Nurses are to blame becasue they do not have the gumsion to form a strong group that will be effective in negotiating with these manipulative hospital executives.  The reasons are many but all come up short in my opinion.  If nurses have respect for their profession and really care about the care that patients receive than they should unionize in Utah.  You hear stories from patinets complaining of never seeing their nursesand the poor care they receive in hospitals.  Are the nurses to blame?  Maybe - based on the above arguments - but the poor care is a direct reflection of the number of patients that nurses are forced to care for becasue hospitals finance their operations (and exorbitant executive pay) on the backs of the very patients they pay lipservice to about their genuine concern.  The hospitals do this by conspiring to keep nursing wages artificcally low thereby restricting entry into the occupation and thereby creating a nursing shortage.

The solution is to allow or maybe even mandate by law that nurses create and join a union to better negotiate with greedy hospitals and the conspiraing executives.  The union would have the interests of its nursing constituency at heart but the pay-off for the public would be adequate numbers of nurses caring for their loved ones when in the hospital. 

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