By now, you’ve already heard from us a few times about the hospital industry's nightmarish plan to increase profits by sending acutely ill patients home to receive “care,” instead of at the hospital where they belong.

This plan, which we call “Home All Alone,” exacerbates inequalities that are baked into our profit-driven health care system.

When hospitals try to sell Home All Alone programs by saying patients prefer to be treated in a familiar home environment, patients and families are forced to either hire a caregiver, likely a woman of color who receives very low wages for long and hard work, or take on the work themselves, which often means having a woman in the family do it without pay. These programs depend on exploiting racial and gender inequities by placing the burden of care onto family or hired caregivers who are predominantly women.

Home All Alone delegates the labor and the risks of care onto patients and their families while hospitals charge the same amount and, under the pandemic’s Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) waivers, are reimbursed at the same rate for at-home care as they are for in-hospital care. It’s a scam, meant to increase profits at the expense of caregivers and quality patient care.

To learn more about the Home All Alone plan to devalue nurses’ labor and care work more broadly, please join our next webinar, “The Corporate Abuse of Caregivers,” next Thursday at 5pm PT/8pm ET.

During the webinar, we’ll hear from a powerful slate of guest speakers, including Zenei Triunfo-Cortez, RN, NNU President; Nancy Folbre, Professor Emerita of Economics and Director of the Program on Gender and Care Work at the Political Economy Research Institute at the University of Massachusetts Amherst; and Raj Patel, Research Professor in the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas, Austin.

We’ll discuss how Home All Alone threatens patient care, jeopardizes RN working conditions, exploits gender inequities, and contributes to the broader devaluation of care work.

Next week’s webinar will show how the Home All Alone program stands in stark contrast to Medicare For All’s promise to cover long-term care, alleviate the need for unpaid family caregiving, and allow for the establishment of uniform national standards of care, including mandating nurse to patient ratios. Will you join us next Thursday?

RSVP now »

We hope to see you there,

Nurses’ Campaign to Win Medicare for All