I earn $8 an hour at a New Hampshire KFC. I'll vote for whoever will change that

Actually, healthcare requires very little customer service skills, and many workers are assholes. If you've recently gotten an injury that required an emergency room visit, you'd likely find pissed off and underpaid EMTs doing the work the nurses used to do, nurses who are horribly understaffed with an irresponsibly high number of patients assigned to them who spend most of their time doing paperwork at a terminal, and nearly every worker there assumes that nearly every young person without a visible injury is drug-seeking. And in many cases you're being cared for by a temporary contract "traveling nurse" because hospitals don't have to pay for their healthcare they are converting as many of their nursing staff as possible.

Technology, and the push towards more accountability and electronic recording has turned nurses and doctors into data entry people. Now hospitals are giving doctors personalized staffs who do nothing but follow and record information that is now tracked. Many nurses who have been in the industry for decades long for the days of 3 patients per nurse and actually having a large part of their job being spending their time actually getting to know their patients as individuals.

And since even nurses who have been doing nursing since before computers were around have to be able to use this complicated new technology, it's been engineered to be incredibly simple software that anyone at any technology level will learn very fast. This is also made this way because of the influx of traveling nurses, since simple systems can be picked up more easily to new temporary employees than complicated ones.

Now, I'm not saying that good care isn't possible, and even common, but what I am saying is that hospitals aren't miraculous places where only modern wizards and geniuses unendingly toil away for the betterment of man. They're places that old ladies who hate computers and can barely see work. Where workers talk absolute trash about most of the patients. They're places where nurses are caught stealing to feed a long time drug habit, which means hardcore drug users can and are caring for patients every single day.

Essentially - it's just another place to work, filled with the same random cross section of society that you get anywhere else. If hospital staff had to wear body cams, or be subject to any kind of recording like police are, most would probably shit themselves from what they saw sometimes happens.

/r/politics Thread Parent Link - theguardian.com