Christy Blanco, a nurse practitioner, is caught in the middle of a tug-of-war between doctors and nurses over who will provide basic primary care for the 30 million U.S. citizens expected to get health insurance under the 2010 health-care law. Nurse practitioners say they can do their jobs just fine without doctors and they're lobbying lawmakers to end restrictions in more than a dozen of the 34 states that require physician oversight. Despite the need for increased care, doctors are pushing back, fighting for restrictions with their own lobbying efforts as well as with lawsuits across the country, arguing that patients' basic care is at risk.
More than 27 million Americans will soon gain health coverage under the health law. But who will treat them all? With such a large coverage expansion, and with an anticipated shortage of primary care physicians available to serve them, some states have or are considering allowing so-called advanced practice nurses—those with advanced degrees—to treat more patients.
An African-American nurse who is suing a Flint hospital because she said it agreed to a man's request that no African-American nurses care for his newborn recalled Monday that she was stunned by her employer's actions. "I didn't even know how to react," said Tonya Battle, 49, a veteran of the neonatal intensive care unit and a nearly 25-year employee of the Hurley Medical Center. Battle's lawsuit states a note was posted on the assignment clipboard reading "No African American nurse to take care of baby," according to the eight-page complaint against the medical center.
Leaning into friendlier political terrain, a union for Minnesota nurses renewed its call Wednesday for state lawmakers to establish requirements that would dictate how hospitals staff their emergency rooms, childbirth wards and other units. The drive to impose minimum staffing levels in law has the union and hospitals bracing for a contentious fight, one that could also expose simmering divides between nurses who are represented by the Minnesota Nurses Association and those who are not. Minnesota would join California as the only states with such a law if new Democratic majorities and Gov. Mark Dayton go along.
Virtually all of the 15,000 employees of Baptist Health South Florida are getting a $1,000 St. Valentine's Day gift to make up for losses in take-home pay caused by increased taxes, the hospital system announced Tuesday. The initiative, which will cost the system $12 million, will benefit everyone except executives—assistant vice president and above—and Baptist-employed physicians.
Unlike patients who have a choice about getting the flu shot, many health care workers didn't have a say this year. For the first time in Rhode Island, hospital and nursing home workers were told to roll up their sleeves, and hundreds of hospitals in other states have similar policies. "No one likes to be coerced, and there were some people who objected," says Virginia Burke, CEO of the Rhode Island Health Care Association, which provides skilled nurses and rehabilitation workers to the state's nursing homes. "My fear when the mandate came out was we'd lose workforce. To my delight, that hasn't happened." But more than 1,000 workers filed a petition to oppose the directive.