|
With health care systems growing more corporatized, financialized, and consolidated, doctors across the country are turning to unionization.
The primary care crisis – prompting many physicians struggling with overwork and stress to leave the field – has left doctors looking at their hospitals and seeing little help coming. Pointing to overwhelming workloads with insufficient pay, staff shortages, and a lack of input into hospital decisions, almost 300 primary care physicians at Mass General Brigham petitioned the National Labor Relations Board last year to allow a vote on unionization.
Now nearly 400 physicians, employed by the Brigham and Women's Physicians Organization and the Mass General Physicians Organization, would like to vote to form a chapter of the Doctors Council of the Service Employees International Union.
Michael Barnett, a primary care physician at Brigham and Women's Hospital and a professor of health policy at the T.H. Chan School, said 2024 was a “tipping point” for Mass General Brigham doctors. He talked about the ongoing effort to unionize PCPs across the Mass General Brigham system with The Codcast hosts John McDonough of the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and Paul Hattis of the Lown Institute.
"As I think through various options for how primary care can get better, I don't know who we can turn to except ourselves,” Barnett said. “And the US has a very long history in labor, when conditions continue to get worse and worse and workers are becoming increasingly dissatisfied with their lot, organization is really the option.”
It is part of a years-long global rise in health care organizing efforts. According to the American Medical Association, US physicians in unions jumped from 46,689 to 67,673 between 2014 and 2019, though that still represents only 7.2 percent of the 938,156 physicians actively practicing in the United States. Union drives in 2023 and 2024 pushed the number higher, with about 8 percent of US physicians covered by unions in the public and private sectors.
The medical community tends to pay attention to the Boston area’s signature medical and higher educational institutions, which means the physicians associated with Mass General Brigham and Harvard have “an obligation” to “really get this right,” Barnett said.
“We are not claiming poverty or trying to bemoan our financial status as people who are suffering in the current economy,” he said. “We’re very aware of our position in kind of the socioeconomic hierarchy. That being said, it is really within everyone's interest to have a primary care workforce that has the most talented, engaged, excited, and productive doctors that we can.”
During the episode, Barnett, McDonough, and Hattis discuss the similarities between this primary care crisis and the crisis of the 1990s (2:40), the response to the organizing efforts from patients and the hospital system (8:20), specific MGB grievances and the broader primary care crisis (20:00), and more.
|
