Posted by
NOTLEGALROADKILLYET on Wednesday, February 14, 2007 1:37:48 PM
Lois Tochtrop and Patricia Stewart are trying to put a provision in Colorado law which would force hospitals to staff themselves as the unions direct or pay a $5,000 a day fine. SB 10 is short enough that it is easily read, and anyone who reads it will quickly come to that conclusion.
I was disgusted with the misleading and outright deceptive guest editorial published in today's Gazette Telegraph by these two women.
Quoting: "The proposal makes no attempt to tell hospitals how they should staff their own facilities."
What the bill does do, though, is to require that hospitals establish staffing committees of which not less than one half of whose membership must be Registered Nurses working in the hospital. If the nurses are unionized, the union gets to pick the nurses on the committee. The purpose of the bill is to force the hospitals to accept union dictated staffing levels.
Quoting: "Aside from disclosing information, hospitals would not be required to do anything they are not doing already. Every hospital already has a staffing plan. Every hospital already tries to stick to it."
The penalty envisioned by this bill for failing to follow this union dictated staffing plan is $5,000 a day. That doesn't make it sound like Senator Tochtrop has any faith in market forces, does it? That inconvenient fact was left out of the article.
Quoting: "Colorado hospitals already keep track of where their patients are, how many patients they have from one shift to the next, and how many nurses are caring for them. SB10 doesn't make hospitals change the way they do business, but it does expose hospitals to the choices of informed consumers."
More importantly to Senator Tochtrop, it exposes hospitals and their insurance companies to additional trial lawyer liability.
Quoting: Instead of using heavy handed regulation, SB-10 enables the market forces that will raise the standard of hospital patient care for all Coloradans.
It is hard to imagine a more heavy handed bill than SB-10. Unions, rather than market forces will require over staffing. Over time, that over staffing destroys the economic viability of the organizations which are forcibly over staffed. If those hospitals go out of business, where will the people these two women are trying to hoodwink go when they are ill?