Jonathan Michels is a freelance journalist and health care worker based in Durham, North Carolina.
Doctors’ unions are rare in the US, and unions comprised of both physicians and other medical providers are even rarer. But in North Carolina, a group of medical providers has successfully organized an interprofessional union.
The National Health Service Corps has been placing primary care providers in working-class communities since 1972, though few have heard of it. We need to not only scale up the program but consider it a model for a health care system that puts people over profit.
A Medicare for All system would benefit almost everyone in America — except health care profiteers. The only way to overcome their opposition is to build a mass movement that’s large enough and powerful enough to defeat them.
The fight for Medicare for All is one of the most important in the United States today. And despite the many horrors of 2020, the movement demanding an end to our privatized health system actually made some headway this year.
Nurses at Mission Health hospital in Asheville, North Carolina, are about to vote on a union. We talked to five of them about why they’re organizing, how health care–worker unions can improve patient care and safety, and what a victory would mean for establishing a beachhead for unions in the South.
For decades, the American Medical Association has fought single-payer tooth and nail. But the US’s corporatized health system hurts doctors too — and cracks are forming in the AMA’s opposition to Medicare for All.