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By Bob Hennelly

On this episode of the Stuck Nation Labor Radio Hour, we talk with physicians from the Doctor’s Council SEIU representing thousands of physicians working at New York City’s Health + Hospitals Corporation. The municipal network of 11 acute care hospitals and 30 Gotham health centers is the largest in the nation, and provides healthcare to all no matter their immigration or economic status—in essence a form of municipal universal healthcare. 

Of course, we all recall the soul-wrenching images that came from Elmhurst Hospital in Queens during the worst of Covid, the mass death event that killed over 1.1 million Americans and tens of thousands of New Yorkers.

In the months since, as you have heard here, it’s been America’s healthcare unions that have been trying to hold our profit-centered healthcare system accountable for its ongoing failures.

The Doctors Council’s contract  lapsed last year, and on this week’s show you will hear from our panel about how an ongoing staffing, retention,  and recruiting crisis is coinciding with a 20-percent spike in emergency room visits and admissions.

In the second half of the show, we talk to Bhairavi Desai, head of the New York Taxi Workers Alliance,  and James Henry, a Yale Global Justice Fellow and international tax expert, about their take on congestion pricing, and some alternatives for paying for the region’s essential mass transit system that’s been chronically underfunded and disjointed. 

Desai and Henry find common ground agreeing that the best solution is to stop rebating back New York State’s Stock Transfer Tax—first put on the books before WWI. 

In the early 1980s, Albany started rebating it back the Stock Transfer Tax and in the years since, nearly $400 billion has been sent back to Wall Street, while dozens of hospitals were closed and critical infrastructure deteriorated.

Listen to the entire show below: