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LOS ANGELES In the early years of his illness, as his kidneys began to shrink and toxins coursed through his blood, the same four words often floated through Miguel Rangel’s mind: “I’m going to die.”
Although some people live much longer, the average life expectancy of dialysis patients is five to 10 years, and Rangel, who has last-stage chronic kidney disease, lives with constant pain and for the last decade has gotten dialysis nightly via a catheter into his abdomen. Still, the 43-year-old electrician, who lives in San Fernando, has trained his mind to linger on hope.
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Health Care Unions Find a Voice in the Pandemic
Faced with the urgent need to protect nurses and other frontline workers, labor organizations are pushing hospitals to do more. Kayla Wilson, a registered nurse, used her lunch break to join nurses demonstrating last month against unsafe staffing practices at Good Samaritan Hospital in San Jose, Calif.Credit.Sarahbeth Maney for The New York Times
Published Jan. 28, 2021Updated Jan. 29, 2021
The unions representing the nation’s health care workers have emerged as increasingly powerful voices during the still-raging pandemic.
With more than 100,000 Americans hospitalized and many among their ranks infected, nurses and other health workers remain in a precarious frontline against the coronavirus and have turned again and again to unions for help.
SACRAMENTO As intensive care units filled and coronavirus cases surged over the holidays, Carmela Coyle invoked a World War II-era quote attributed to British Prime Minister Winston Churchill to rally her own troops: If you re going through hell, keep going.
Coyle is head of the California Hospital Association, and her troops are the highly paid hospital executives she represents. Throughout the pandemic, as in the December memo in which she quoted Churchill, she has employed battlefield rhetoric to galvanize their massive political and financial clout.
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That s because Coyle believes hospitals are quite simply in battle conditions a sentiment she has impressed upon the state s top health care officials.