IT'S AMUSING TO SEE RIGHT-WINGERS TRIUMPHANTLY QUOTING TWO VERY PROGRESSIVE UNION HEADS

I have nothing much to add to what I'm sure you've already read about the mishandling of Thomas Eric Duncan at Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital:

A statement outlining a litany of damning assertions was read by Deborah Burger, co-president of National Nurses United. The Oakland-based nurses union does not represent the Dallas nurses, who are nonunionized, but has been vocal about what it says are hospitals' failures to prepare for Ebola.

The Dallas nurses asked the union to read their statement so they could air complaints anonymously and without fear of losing their jobs, National Nurses United Executive Director RoseAnn DeMoro said from Oakland....

The nurses' statement alleged that when Duncan was brought to Texas Health Presbyterian by ambulance with Ebola-like symptoms, he was "left for several hours, not in isolation, in an area" where up to seven other patients were. "Subsequently, a nurse supervisor arrived and demanded that he be moved to an isolation unit, yet faced stiff resistance from other hospital authorities," they alleged.

Duncan's lab samples were sent through the usual hospital tube system "without being specifically sealed and hand-delivered. The result is that the entire tube system ... was potentially contaminated," they said....

I'm amused, however, to see this union and its officers being quoted favorably by outraged conservatives at Right Wing News, CNS News, Free Republic, and other sites on the right. Do these righties know anything about their new favorite whistleblowers?

Burger advocates single-payer and opposes the Keystone pipeline, as does DeMoro. They also advocate a Robin Hood Tax on Wall Street financial transactions. In a Washington Post op-ed published Monday, DeMoro tied our Ebola problems to the private, for-profit nature of our health care system:

... Ebola is exposing a broader problem: the sober reality of our fragmented, uncoordinated private health-care system. We have enormous health-care resources in the United States. What we lack is a national, integrated system needed to respond effectively to a severe national threat such as Ebola.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention issues guidelines but has no authority to enforce them. Hospitals have wide latitude to pick and choose what protocols they will follow; too often in a corporate medical system those decisions are based on budget priorities, not what is best for the health and safety of patients and caregivers. Congress and state lawmakers put few mandates on what hospitals must do in the face of pandemics or other emergencies, and local health officials do not have the authority to direct procedures and protocols at hospitals.

Where other countries -- notably Canada, which took action after its vulnerabilities were exposed by the 2003 SARS epidemic -- have empowered their public health agencies to coordinate local, state and federal detection and response efforts for pandemics, the United States cut funding for its already-weak system. Federal funding for public health preparedness and response activities was $1 billion less in fiscal 2013 than 2002....

Why do we know what went on in Texas Health Presbyterian when Thomas Duncan came in? Because a union was able to tell us. Conservatives would prefer an America in which no health care workers were unionized at all. They should remember that when they're quoting National Nurses United.