1700+ nurse strike is causing complications

By Taxpayers Association of Oregon
OregonWatchdog.com

People who should have had necessary surgeries right now have been pushed to 3-4 weeks away as over 1,700 Providence staff go on a strike today.

This puts people at serious risk.

We think the issue is much larger than just pay.  The worksite, Indeed, states that Providence nurses make 14% more than the average.

The issue that is not being talked about is that nurses are being overloaded.   Before the pandemic, Oregon was rated as the worst state for hospital capacity.   Oregon had the hospital beds, but not the nurses to staff them.    This is a direct result of Oregon’s health care taxes and government mandates which has bled hospitals dry, in addition to unions that pass laws making it hard to build hospitals (certificate of need) and hard to hire nurses from out-of-state.

Then the pandemic happened, and Oregon was among 6 states with the strictest and least flexible vaccinate-or-be-fired laws.

While nearly most states had no requirement at all and other states had weekly testing for the unvaccinated in order to keep their nurses, Oregon had neither.

Not only did this law kick out unvaccinated nurses, but it had the effect of pushing out vaccinated nurses who did not want to work in the chaos that the State of Oregon was creating.  Those nurses left and became Traveling Nurses which were independent and often paid double to triple what they were making previously.  Read our previous article Unexpected twist: Vaccinated quiting.

Tablet explains that in 2021, it was well known that the vaccine (although helpful in reducing virus effects on the person taking it) had not the same impact on blocking transmission.  Tablet states, “…studies had already shown by the fall of 2021 that the vaccines did not prevent infection, that natural immunity was at least as protective, that vaccinated people had similar viral loads to unvaccinated people, and that vaccinated people had a role in transmission.”    Other states were using this data as a sound reason to keep their nurses while Oregon was ignoring it and causing a nightmare in our hospitals as nurses fled — both vaccinated and unvaccinated.

Last year, Oregon hospitals lost $300 million dollars!

That loss is a direct result of Oregon’s high health care taxes and costly government mandates.

The only way a hospital can run, when they are losing tens of millions of dollars, is to pile on the patients on nurses as they have no profits to hire more nurses.

This is unfair to the nurses.

This is unfair to the patients.

We should give hospitals relief from taxes and regulations (ones that do not exist in most other states) instead of more costs.

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