On Jan 10, the Oregon Nurses Association launched the largest healthcare strike in Oregon state history. Some 5k frontline caregivers from 8 Providence hospitals and 6 clinics have been holding the line in freezing temperatures as they fight for basic rights that their employer—a Catholic nonprofit healthcare system whose C Suite members make millions of dollars every year—refuses to give them.
Derek discusses why such strikes, and unions in general, are so important as the new administration takes office. He breaks down some of Providence’s past legal problems, discusses his own experience as a Providence patient, and talks to some of the nurses on the strike line.
Show Notes
Dr Jennifer Lincoln
Oregon Nurses Association
Resources for striking healthcare professionals
It's Time for Providence to Put Patients Before Profits
Providence, striking Oregon health workers remain apart on key issues
They Were Entitled to Free Care. Hospitals Hounded Them to Pay.
Hospital System to Refund Poor Patients Who Were Entitled to Free Care
Wealthiest Hospitals Got Billions in Bailout for Struggling Health Providers
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
It's day one of the largest healthcare strike in Oregon history.
I'm at my second location at the St. Vincent Medical Center, which is closer to Beaverton.
I'm walking around the strike line with a representative from the Oregon Nurses Association who's leading the strike, and he introduces me to a nurse that...
Did not want to be recorded for anything because she was in a rather emotional state for very good reason.
She began working at Providence in 2013, and two years ago she was diagnosed with colon cancer, which can be a rather rough cancer.
Thankfully, she survived.
She had access to really good care because, despite a lot of the things I'm going to say during this brief, Providence has excellent doctors and nurses and hospitalists and all sorts of specialists.
My wife and I have been patients of Providence for nearly three years since moving to Portland.
She gets over the cancer, she gets through the radiation and chemotherapy, and her cancer is in remission.
Then...
About two months ago, she finds out her PSA levels are high, so she has to go in and get some more testing.
As she's on the strike line, and this is five minutes before I begin talking to her, she gets a phone call from her health insurance company telling her, They are not going to cover the expense of the scans that she needs to find out if the cancer has returned.
She's on the strike line with her husband.
She's in tears.
I'm holding back tears.
Everyone's like, what the fuck is going on?
And all around us are hundreds of other Providence workers.
Who are striking because the situation at that healthcare system has gotten so bad that they had no other choice.
And that's what I want to talk about today.
You're listening to A Conspirituality Brief.
I'm Derek Barris.
As always, you can find us on Instagram and threads at ConspiritualityPod.
and you can also find us on Patreon and Apple podcast subscriptions if you have the means to support independent media because this is how Matthew, Julian, and myself make a living.
Thanks as always for listening.
Let's get into it.
On January 10th, the Oregon Nurses Association launched the largest healthcare strike in Oregon state history.
Some 5,000 frontline caregivers from eight Providence hospitals and six clinics have been outside all day since that date, with temperatures now here in the 20s in the morning and creeping up to the 30s.
It's pretty fucking cold at the moment.
Why does this matter for this podcast?
Remember, we are a podcast about the intersection of the left and right, often crossing over into various wellness claims.
At least that's been my focus for nearly five years on the podcast.
As long-time listeners will know, we began the week the pseudo-documentary Plandemic dropped in May of 2020. We started the podcast as a response to the anti-vax movement, which is something I've been covering as a journalist for over a decade now.
Health, and by extension, health care, are foundational to this podcast.
This anti-vax movement, as many of you will know, has created this juggernaut that is known as Maha, or Make America Healthy Again.
Where, on a daily basis, we're treated to all of the supposed problems with seed oils and red dye number three and vaccines and all this bluster about chronic disease.
And yet, there's so little focus on universal healthcare, on fixing our healthcare system.
Because from the wellness influencer perspective...
The medical system is the problem, not a solution.
It is their services and supplements and all the untested, unregulated products that they sell and all the coaches who aren't trained in anything so that they can be able to sell their products and services.
They view doctors and nurses as maybe, at best, okay for critical care, but not for everyday maintenance.
The irony being that at root, what they preach is what every medical doctor has long been advocating for, which is a stable and solid diet, regular movement, plenty of sleep, hydration, all the foundational basics of health.
It's just that they gloss it up with all of these new and excited supposed studies and products, and then they have to demonize healthcare professionals in the process without realizing As you're going to hear today, the healthcare professionals also have issues with the medical system that is the for-profit healthcare system here in America.
We are the only nation in the developed world without any sort of universal health care.
As I recently covered in a bonus episode, we have four different types of patchwork health care systems that exist in other nations.
It's just all jumbled and it's just all jumbled.
And in our for-profit system, people often don't have access to the doctors.
They don't have access to the supposed foods that all the wellness influencers, they are the victims of the social determinants of health, which is another thing you will never hear Maha address.
If you want to fix people's health, you start with our healthcare system.
And why this brief seems even more important to me at the Donald Trump rescinded Joe Biden's Executive Order 14087, which was put in place to lower the cost of prescription drugs in America.
So basically, Biden's executive order capped generic drugs at $2 if you're a Medicare patient, many generic drugs at least, improved high-cost therapies for Medicaid patients, meaning the Medicaid patients who are already subsisting at a level of poverty because they are on Medicaid, need the most care meaning the Medicaid patients who are already subsisting at a level of poverty because they are So Biden was trying to make that available through cost interventions.
And it also accelerated the evidence-gathering phase for new drugs that were going through clinical trials to try to expedite how quickly they can get to people who needed them.
By rescinding the order, Trump basically just halted the development of cost reduction models for Medicare and Medicaid patients.
He's potentially increasing the price of all sorts of medications, including generics.
And he might have just thrown future discussions about controlling or reducing patient expenses right out the fucking window.
So in summation, he basically just gave Big Pharma a lot more money and control.
This is the guy who's going to lead the Maha movement by installing RFK Jr. as the head or the secretary of the HHS. Let's also keep in mind that Project 2025 is the blueprint for this administration and the Heritage Foundation, and this is an incomplete list because this is only a brief, so I don't have time to get into it, but here's a few of the things that Heritage calls for.
They want to let corporations union bust in secret.
They want to make it illegal for employers to voluntarily recognize unions.
They want to let employers...
Take away unions mid-contract.
Retaliate against union organizers.
They want to let companies create sham unions.
This is a big one where they let a company or the workers form a union, but they install the head, the board, as the intermediary.
So they talk to the C-suite to really work out the problems.
They want to let state ban labor unions.
They want to let employers stop paying overtime.
They want to repeal labor and wage protections on federal projects.
They want to privatize unemployment programs.
This is one of my favorites.
They want to eliminate child labor protections and start having children work again.
They want to tax workers' health care benefits.
All of this is in the 920-page Project 2025 document that anyone for over three years has been able to download on the internet and read for yourself.
And guess what?
They're in charge now.
That's why this topic, especially hitting so close to home, literally a mile away from where I live at one of the centers and my own medical system, is so meaningful and pertinent to the larger project of health and healthcare in America looked at through a conspiracy lens.
I went over some of these things a couple weeks ago on episode 239, Conspiracy of Dunces, but I want to revisit them there for context, because Providence Health and Services is the largest or one of the largest healthcare providers in Oregon.
They're actually based in Washington State, and they are a non-profit Catholic hospital system.
Apparently, according to Dr. Jennifer Lincoln, who we'll be hearing from in a few minutes, They are valued at $30 billion.
Now, it's very important to point out that they're nonprofit.
And if you go to ProPublica's nonprofit Explorer website, you will see that their assets and their in and out, their accounting every year, does...
Basically fit the mold of a non-profit, but here's the thing.
They pay dozens of their C-suite and high-level employees millions of dollars, including outgoing CEO Rodney Hockman, who was there for, I think, 11 years.
He was earning $10 million plus a year as of last year.
His replacement is Eric Wexler, who's been with the Providence System for about a decade.
His salary is not available.
Well, we can guess he was making $5 million in previous roles.
All that's to say is they're making a lot of fucking money in our for-profit healthcare system, which is especially rich if you're coming from a Catholic nonprofit perspective, which is what they're registered as.
They have been known for extremely shady and manipulative business practices.
in 2022, New York Times conducted two separate investigations into them.
One was they found that Providence accepted a half billion dollars in COVID relief funds despite having $12 billion in cash reserves.
And the second found that they hired McKinsey and Company, this one's so fucked, to create a program that requires payments from patients after their Medicare and Medicaid reimbursants were received.
This is illegal.
And so the state attorney general successfully sued Providence, and they had to go and forgive $137 million in medical debt that should have never fallen onto patients in the first place, and they had to refund $20 million to patients that actually did pay.
Now that's not all.
Providence was also forced to pay $220 million to 33,000 employees who they underpaid between 2018 and 2023. That should give you an idea of the type of organization we're dealing with.
I want to now discuss Dr. Jennifer Lincoln, who I did not interview for this piece.
We're going to hear from a few nurses in a few minutes that I did interview.
She is sort of leading the charge on social media.
She has 231,000 followers, is an OBGYN at Providence.
Her feed is wonderful.
I highly recommend, and I'll link to her in the show notes to stay up to date on what's going on.
Besides that, she also takes down wellness influencers and their bullshit claims, so I like following her anyway.
But a few days before the strike, she posted the following text-based carousel, which explains the strike, and I'm going to read it just so you know why all of these healthcare workers are striking.
Quote, Today we announced we are striking on January 10th.
At my hospital, this includes the IM, MedPeds, Palliative Care, and OB hospitalists, and the Providence-employed OBGYNs, midwives, and all the nurses.
In total, 11 bargaining units across 8 Providence hospitals and clinics are joining in this strike.
Almost 5,000 doctors, nurses, NPs, PAs, and midwives had had it with a Providence CEO who makes over $11 million a year while we just want safe staffing.
I said $10 million a little while ago.
That's what I found online.
You can choose which figure you're going to trust.
Back to Jennifer.
We will strike for as long as it takes.
Providence can avoid this by actually compromising in the next 10 days before the strike begins and realizing what we need to deliver the fantastic care we provide.
Spoiler alert, they did not.
Wait till you see what they've done in bargaining so far.
Okay, so now she lays out why they're bargaining.
Quote, We even compromised and put in language for exceptions in unforeseen circumstances.
They refused, even though another Portland hospitalist contract has this exact language.
We asked for specific staffing targets and mandatory posting when more doctors and NPs are needed to safely care for patients.
They refused.
They said we could form a committee in the next year with no help for us now.
The St. Vincent palliative care hospitalist asked not to be forced to travel to Providence hospitals all over Oregon, and if they were asked, to have some limits and, you know, be compensated for said travel.
Providence rejected this ask entirely.
Let's pause here.
This means that Providence could ask their hospitalists to just travel.
Oregon's a pretty big state.
It's not like Texas or California, but driving to Boise from Portland is seven hours, and I'm an hour and a half from the coast.
Most of the hospitals are closer towards the coast, but it's still hours of travel and also in Washington state.
And they would just be forced to go work shifts, not be compensated for travel time or any extra pay or overtime.
Okay, back to Jennifer.
Providence offered night differential and signing bonuses for the IM and MedPeds hospitalists, but refused this for OB hospitalists who regularly manage 3A emergencies.
Does Providence really not value the all-female OB hospitalist staff and the women they care for?
That might be it right there.
the all-female staff that Providence would not provide for, whereas for more male-dominated fields, they honored the same requests.
The night before the strike, so now we're talking January 9th, she posted a video discussing how Providence was dealing with what they were facing, And let's listen to that now.
It's January 9th, one day before the historic healthcare strike where doctors, nurses, midwives, nurse practitioners, PAs are going to strike because Providence, which could have avoided this by bargaining in good faith after over a year for a lot of us, has refused to.
Managers are telling people that they can't talk to unionized workers on the strike line.
At one clinic, they're saying if they strike, it's just going to show that the clinic does just fine without the providers and maybe the clinic will just keep going.
Or maybe it'll close and it's all their fault.
They're taking out full-page ads in the Oregonian where they're making up complete lies trying to do a public smear campaign about us.
They're doubling down because they know they have to scare us because that's all they have to stand on.
And they're scared because they see how unified we are.
I mean, look at this letter from the Senate president and House Speaker they sent to the Providence execs saying, you all better get back and take care of the people who take care of the people.
So my message to you today is be strong.
Don't believe the BS. If they say something that sounds scary or weird, reach out to your union representative.
Tomorrow is our day, unfortunately, because Providence is doing nothing to prevent it.
But we are in the right here because we are trying to take care of patients.
And that will always win.
Stay strong, my friends.
The first day on the strike line was very emotional and very energetic.
I talked to a lot more people than I recorded.
But everyone had each other's backs, which is really important in situations like this.
Jennifer has been posting on a daily basis with the updates.
Here's the Day 6 update because, as it turns out, Providence has been paying somewhere.
There's no definitive number, but...
Between $14 and $24 million a week for the replacement nurses who apparently were flown up from the South.
And here Dr. Lincoln explains a little bit about what that situation is going on inside.
And I want you again to remember that everyone I talk to, the people I've been following online, when I talk to reps at the Oregon Nurses Association, They're really just looking for worker protections so that they can provide the best care.
They want to be in working with patients, but they can't because this has been going on for over a year and a half since they've been asking for simple protections.
So when you hear Jennifer talk about some of the things going inside, just keep that in mind that this isn't any sort of schadenfreude happening.
They don't want those nurses in there working.
She's just trying to explain the reality of what patients are dealing with because Providence cannot provide for its workers.
Okay, let's listen.
Okay, so the replacement nurses are even like, don't come here.
You're saying they've never had such unsafe working conditions and the assignments and the acuity have been so unsafe.
It's almost like the reason that we're striking is what they don't like.
We appreciate your honesty.
And now on Tales from the Inside, all of this stuff I have permission to post.
This is from someone who had a baby during the strike, who said the nurses weren't taking my pressures when needed.
Instead, they would shut the machine down to stop the cuff from doing the test so the numbers would look better later.
That's not how it works.
She also said most of these replacement nurses come from the South and don't understand our culture here in Oregon.
Put a pin in that, as they say in corporate America.
She then goes on to say that nurses are being put in places that they don't have experience in.
And this replacement day nurse doesn't normally do postpartum care and was missing things.
This person says it's been a shit show without the normal staff.
But that they support us being out there to get better for our patients.
Remember that whole Pacific Northwest culture?
Let's just say that some of the nurses don't understand reproductive rights and how they apply to bodily autonomy and how our patients can access certain things here.
That's all I'm going to say about that.
It's been shared that the nurses who work on labor and delivery don't know how to work the OR equipment, including the very special equipment that tells you exactly how much blood a patient has lost.
Kind of important.
There was a CNA who quit after the replacement nurses were mocking him because he was alerting them to the bed alarms that were saying, hey, these patients need help, and they were making fun of him for caring, and he said, F you, and he quit.
One surgeon shared with me that she had a surgery and the nurses prepared nothing that is normally done, and she was told she would have to do everything for this.
Day surgery procedure, which is not how it normally works, and slowed down the entire OR flow day.
Now let's move on to how Providence is staffing these replacement nurses.
Because it's so interesting that Providence can have the right number of nurses on staff when they're replacements, who are ridiculously more expensive than when their regular nurses are there.
And they say, I'm so sorry, we can't do it.
So in the Prov Milwaukee ICU, they have six beds.
They were staffed with nine nurses.
This never happens when it's the regular people there.
Prov Milwaukee Emergency Department has 21 beds, and the day before the strike, 19 of the 21 beds were patients boarding, which means that these are patients who are admitted but didn't have a room yet, which is a huge problem.
But interestingly, on day one of the strike, all those patients had a place to go, and the ER was fine.
I can't imagine what the thinking is, that you would not take care of your employees.
But you'll hire scabs and pay them what you should actually be paying your employees who can't deliver the same quality service, obviously, because they're coming, as Dr. Lincoln said, from other states.
They don't know the territory.
And it's really just hard to listen to because...
Again, as a Providence patient, I'm glad I'm not in any of the hospitals right now having to deal with this.
And imagine being someone who's pregnant, having to work with these nurses who are in over their heads.
I don't know them and I'm not going to make judgment calls about crossing a picket line because...
Working is a difficult thing to do in America, unfortunately.
And sometimes you take opportunities wherever you can.
And I have seen no ill will toward the nurses who are going in from the nurses on the picket line.
What it boils down to is the nurses who are striking and the hospitalists and the doctors and everyone else just want to feel as if they're valued as people and taken care of, which I think they deserve.
When I was over at St. Vincent, I talked to a man named Daniel, who was a bedside nurse, and here's what he told me when I asked him what the number one thing he wanted out of the stripe is.
And we deserve to have a stake at the table that's respected and honored in the process of making sure that our patients are cared for.
We bring meaningful perspectives and we bring lots of experience and we bring data.
We're a data-driven entity.
I can't come to you and say that this is good or bad based on my feelings.
We can show you the research that this is an appreciable thing for us to have pay increases and safe staffing levels.
And that needs to be heard and respected.
And that needs to come to the table on a contract that we can stand next to and appreciate and support and say yes to.
I had asked a group of women in the area if they wanted to talk and no one wanted to go on camera.
But then they turned and called Daniel over and they promised him.
Thank you, Daniel.
I also talked to George, who is an endoscopy nurse, over at my hospital in Portland proper, and I asked him the same question about what he was looking for, the number one thing.
Here's what he said.
The thing I would like is an improvement in our health insurance.
We have one of the worst health insurance policies of any hospital in the area, and without any explanation, Providence actually just dropped us off their own health insurance plan and moved us to an Aetna plan.
We don't know why.
They didn't even give us an explanation.
Yes, which is extremely puzzling.
Providence has made an exception, so we can still go to Providence facilities on Aetna insurance.
It's very confusing, but people are having to change providers.
If they were going to a non-Providence provider, Providence covered, but Aetna doesn't.
There's been a lot of disruption.
We have high deductibles.
It's just not a competitive health plan compared to the other hospitals in the area.
Just imagine your own employer, which is a healthcare system, dropping you from their insurance and pushing you off to an insurer who has just dropped your healthcare system and then they need to make an exception.
This is so ass-backwards.
It's unbelievable.
Finally, over at St. Vincent's, I talked to an older man who was talking about his grandson and the care that his daughter received at Providence.
I unfortunately was not recording when he told me his name, so I do not remember, and I apologize for that.
But I thought it was nice to hear from someone who is just talking about the exceptional care that he received and why he decided to go on the strike line to support the people that helped his family.
And you'll probably hear in his voice, we talked for a lot longer that I'm sharing this moment from.
But tears were in his eyes the entire time as he remembered about what his daughter went through.
The thing that stands out, too, is that it wasn't just medical, that they did the love and nurturing and the way they helped my daughter get through the anxiety of all this happening to her.
The mental aspect of what these ladies do is...
Equal or ahead sometimes of the medical procedures.
And the combination of the two is magic.
I mean, I call it a miracle.
It's what they do every day.
I'm, you know, just a general population person that takes it for granted until it happens to your family.
And then you go, wow, they are something special.
That's what they are.
Like a lot of people, I've had really good healthcare experiences, and I've had shit doctors.
I worked in an emergency room for two years and saw up close what an insane place that is from an employee perspective, and I was not a doctor or a nurse having to be actually hands-on with people.
But I will always remember those doctors and nurses and secretaries and administrators, all the people along the way.
Who have just decided to dedicate their lives in some capacity to helping other people and how valuable they are.
And looking at it from the perspective of the work that we do on this podcast, when I hear these wellness influencers shit talk healthcare professionals the way they do, it angers me more than most other things or any aspects of the coverage that we do for very personal reasons.
We do not have a sick care system.
We have a healthcare system that's dictated by unfettered capitalism, and those are very different things.
There are perverse incentives for sure, but within the structure and the foundation woven into that system are millions of people who are doing the best that they can.
And I'm so happy to be in a city where so many people I'm going to close with a clip that Dr. Lincoln posted over the weekend.
The reality is, these workers are not getting paid right now as they fight for their rights, and that's very challenging on a number of levels, especially considering the people that...
I don't inherently hate people for making good money for what they do.
I'm actually quite a fan of entrepreneurship and startups.
I've worked for a number of them over the last decade of my life.
I have my own company with a podcast.
I have a non-profit.
There's an entrepreneurial spirit, which I very much appreciate about America.
But when you're taking something that in every other developed nation is provided for through taxation or other means for all citizens so that you don't find things like litigious patience, Constantly suing doctors when you don't find things like medical bankruptcy so that people don't have to worry about their healthcare coverage.
You can actually flourish as a society in ways that are not possible in America.
And it sets up the exact wellness influencer grifting dynamic that we see on a daily basis here.
The reality is we are moving into completely uncharted territory in the new administration and we know what the Heritage Foundation and the techno-monarchists want to create in our society and are already laying the foundation for.
They have a lot to work with given how fucked most citizens are when it comes to just wondering whether or not you should go to a doctor or a hospital to get care because you don't know if you can afford it.
Right now, these 5,000 plus workers can't afford a lot of things.
So I want to close with Dr. Jennifer Lincoln, who posted over the weekend some resources for these workers, which includes crowdfunding.
I will include some links in the show notes if you are willing to and want to support these workers as they're going through it.
I fear we're going to see a lot more of this in the coming years.
I fear it because we even have to do it.
But at the same time, we need to support unions and we need to support workers, especially those who are literally invested in our health.
Number one, first and foremost, is the Hardship Fund.
We have raised an amazing amount of money.
We've actually had other partners donating tens of thousands of dollars as well.
So we are able to support you.
This is where you can donate it, but you can go to the Oregon Nurses Association homepage to see how...
The second thing I want you to know is that interest-free loans from AFT are coming.
You can reach out to this lovely fellow here who can answer your questions.
But yes, in the beginning of February, if we're still on the line, interest-free loans.
So free money that you can pay back so that you can hold the line for a contract that we deserve and our patients deserve.
And third is a really cool one I just found out about called the Labor's Community Service Agency.
They are a group local here in Oregon and Southwest Washington.
And they are able to help things like rent assistance, food cards for people who have fallen on hard times, such as people who are striking.
You can contact them through their website.
You can get to it through Instagram.
So there are options out there, and we know that holding the line is not easy.
I just want you to know that returning to work for Providence, who is showing us just what they think of us, isn't the only option in order to figure out how to make ends meet.
