Nurses Should Get Organized

The nursing profession has historically been one of the most important in medicine and least respected. Given the cost of health care, nurses are hardly compensated proportionate to their contribution to the end product, improved health and well being of the patients. And nursing is one of those rare professions that cannot be easily offshore outsourced. Indeed, you have to move the patient if you want to do this and that is often infeasible. Thus, nurses could potentially have far more clout over medicine and their own compensation packages than is currently the case. Better national organization of nurses, including the potential of national strikes, could improve working conditions for nurses, including greater respect for their work, and a fairer share of the value of health care provided. Let most people, I'm not keen on the cost of medical care increasing. However, I don't have a problem with a more equitable distribution of the value of health care. And, as far as I can tell, nurses play a central role in health care but are not treated as such.