The historic nurses’ strike in New York City has entered its second week with no resolution in sight. This strike serves as a glaring reminder of the fragility within the U.S. healthcare system, a scenario far from ideal for patients and society at large. The situation echoes the sentiment of lovelytheband’s 2018 hit “Broken,” capturing the essence of a system in disarray.
The labor dispute began on January 12, when approximately 15,000 nurses, dissatisfied with their current pay and working conditions, walked off their jobs across the Mount Sinai, Montefiore, and NewYork-Presbyterian hospital systems. Since then, the New York State Nurses Association, the union representing the nurses, has been locked in negotiations with hospital management. They demand pay raises and better safety measures for nurses. Early talks last week reached an impasse, prompting the involvement of a federal mediator.
NYC Nurses Strike Began On Monday
Despite these efforts, an agreement remains elusive. Angela Karafazli, a spokeswoman for NewYork-Presbyterian, labeled the union’s proposals as “unreasonable,” while the New York State Nurses Association criticized the lack of progress, stating that hospital executives rejected their revised proposals without offering alternatives.
This isn’t the only labor unrest in the healthcare sector. The United Nurses Associations of California/Union of Health Care Professionals have issued a 10-day notice of their intention to strike. Over 31,000 nurses and healthcare professionals at Kaiser Permanente plan to walk out on January 26. The union argues that despite Kaiser’s substantial financial reserves, it continues to understaff facilities and burden healthcare workers without providing wages that match the rising costs of living.
Kaiser Permanente Nurses Strike Planned
This situation should not come as a surprise. In 2022, the U.S. Surgeon General released a report titled “Addressing Health Worker Burnout,” highlighting the U.S. healthcare system’s critical state. The report, a call to action against burnout, underscored that even before the pandemic, burnout was prevalent among 35-54% of nurses and physicians and 45-60% of medical students and residents.
Nurses Strike Is Not Surprising Given Ongoing Burnout Problem Among All Healthcare Professionals
If there were a Festivus for the U.S. healthcare system, the airing of grievances would be lengthy. Challenges facing healthcare workers predate COVID-19 and include a rapidly evolving healthcare landscape, complex information streams, heavy administrative loads, loss of autonomy, and harassment, among others. These issues continue to underscore the urgent need for systemic changes within the U.S. healthcare system.
Yep, if there were a Festivus specifically for the U.S. healthcare system, the airing of grievances part could go on and on and on with the Frank Costanzas among healthcare professionals and patients saying “I got a lot of problems with youz people,” meaning the people running the system. The Surgeon General’s report mentioned challenges and demands that health workers faced even before the COVID-19 pandemic. These included a rapidly changing health care environment, complex arrays of information to synthesize, increasingly burdensome administrative tasks, loss of autonomy, flexibility, and voice, spreading misinformation and disinformation, lack of leadership support, unrealistic expectations, poor care coordination, harassment and discrimination, and excessive hours and workload.
Nurses Strike Highlights Increasing Pay Gap Between Healthcare Executives And Healthcare Professionals
And here’s something to pay attention to in healthcare system: where the pay is going. Nurses going on strike in NYC have mentioned that the pay of healthcare executives at the Mount Sinai, Montefiore and NewYork-Presbyterian systems suggests that there are more resources available to pay nurses and other healthcare professionals more. For example, the reported salary of Steven J. Corwin, the outgoing CEO and President of New York-Presbyterian Hospital, in 2024 was over $26 million, which would be 161 times the $163,000 average salary of a nurse, according to what Somaiyah Hafeez wrote for The Mirror.
This pay gap between executives and healthcare professionals—you know the people who are actually doing the direct patient care work—isn’t unique to these healthcare systems in NYC. A study published in the journal Health Affairs in August 2025 found that the average wage of chief executives rose by 27.5% from 2009 to 2023 compared to the only 9.8% rise in the average pay for all hospital employees over that same time period. This sort of mirrors what’s been happening in the corporate world in general in the U.S.
The past three decades have seen increasing corporatization of healthcare in the U.S. That’s included bigger and bigger chunks of healthcare dollars going to not only executives but also things like posh offices and advertising. There have also been extensive mergers and acquisitions, moving healthcare organizations from smaller ones to increasingly massive ones.
COVID-19 Pandemic Highlighted Existing Problems With The Healthcare System
The COVID-19 pandemic in many ways was like a gigantic vacuum cleaner. Not only did it suck, the pandemic also uncovered many of the existing problems in society. One of those big problems was the U.S. healthcare system. Recall that in 2020 the U.S. healthcare system struggled to keep up with the influx of patients. Many clinics and hospitals did not have the staffing and redundancy to handle the surges in demand. Heck, clinics and hospitals didn’t even have enough N95 face masks to go around. A lot of healthcare professionals, including doctors and nurses, donated time by working extra long hours without compensation to take care of patients. Did they later get rewarded for going above and beyond? Not exactly.
In fact, the opposite kind of happened. Misinformation and disinformation about health raged on and on, with people and bots making claims that fostered distrust of healthcare professionals. All of this hasn’t created the greatest working conditions and environments for healthcare professionals.
But rather than fix all of the aforementioned problems, political and business leaders seem to have largely ignored them. And that will continue to be to the detriment of society. Healthcare professionals like nurses who directly care for patients are central to healthcare. If they aren’t happy or present, patient care will undoubtedly suffer. That, in turn, can lead to preventable suffering and deaths as well as lost productivity for businesses and other organizations around the country.
Also, don’t underestimate the reverberating effects that a nurses strike can have. The existing work needs to be passed along to other already overstretched healthcare professionals like doctors, physical therapists and technicians. That, in turn, can worsen their frustration and burnout, which will further erode the U.S. healthcare system that’s seemingly being held together by Band Aids. Many people don’t realize how broken the system is until they get sick and need it. It is striking how often people wait until disasters happen before realize that something is in dire need of being fixed.
