I stand with the nurses! ✊ Universal healthcare is a right. Our system in the US is broken and needs to be abandoned in favor of one where everyone is covered. Period.

In a move that backfired, one of the deans from Robert Wood Johnson Medical School at Rutgers, Dr. Carol Terregino, sent an email to second, third and fourth year medical students asking them to volunteer when nurses go on strike. She said the students would be “answering call bells, checking in on patients and supporting the replacement nursing staff.”

The medical students refused, writing back that “the request to provide unpaid labor in jobs we are not trained to do at the expense of our own educational programming raises concerns about exploitation and risks creating an unsafe environment for patients.”

Meanwhile the CEO of the hospital planning to use these “volunteers” is paid $16 million a year…

Higher education problems collide with healthcare problems to create a gigantic mess that seems nearly impossible to fix. The public doesn’t care about academics, who are viewed as lazy people who barely do any “real work” for their salaries. The public isn’t voting in a direction for healthcare reform, either. Graduate students, professors, and teaching staff continue to be exploited. Corporate healthcare continues to dominate and interface with higher education at the medical school and the hospital. Public officials aren’t doing anything because nobody asks them to. I wonder when enough people will get concerned about this? Maybe when it’s too late?