Healthcare workers and patients are on the same side. Privatized healthcare is the enemy.

Healthcare workers at Kaiser Permanente, the largest private health care corporation in the United States, are on the picket lines inthe biggest healthcare strike in U.S. history.

The current walkout does not include doctors and nurses who are also overworked and understaffed.

The strikers are demanding a new contract with inflationary wage increases, increased staffing and improved benefits for retirees.

For me the Kaiser strike is personal.

My eldest daughter was delivered at Kaiser hospital in Hollywood.

My mother, who had Hodgkins Lymphoma, was a patient at Kaiser in Los Angeles back when not a whole lot was known about the disease. She lived with it for a dozen years, not the least of the reasons was the excellent care she received from the healthcare workers at Kaiser.

She died in 1977.

The workers at Kaiser deserve all that they are demanding.

They are demands that directly benefit patients and patient care.

A column in today’s New York Times goes into detail the conditions that patients and providers face because of privatized American healthcare.

It is a system that is unacceptable to the rest of the industrialized world.

Healthcare in America is capitalism at its deadliest.

The strike is scheduled for only three days. It comes after Kaiser failed to meet union demands that include adequate staffing.

Involved are eight unions representing health care workers from a variety of job descriptions and covers Kaiser facilities in California, Colorado, Oregon, Washington, Virginia, and Washington City.

The strike represents about 40% of all Kaiser Permanente staff.

Service Employees International Union-United Healthcare (SEIU-UHW) is the largest union in the coalition.

One of the key points that the strikers are making is that poor working conditions means poor healthcare for us, the patient.

When the Covid pandemic was at its worst, the media was filled with stories of heroic healthcare workers, risking their own lives, isolated from their families for weeks and months, moving thousands of miles to serve patients who otherwise would have no care.

Meanwhile, medical corporations, hedge funds and private equity investors and Big Pharma were making out like bandits.

Which they are. Absolute bandits.

Now the bill has come due.