The largest nurses strike in New York City history reached its seventh day on Sunday with no clear end in sight. And even if this strike at some point gets resolved, it should be yet another striking reminder that the U.S. healthcare system is like the title of that 2018 song from lovelytheband: “Broken.” A broken healthcare system, in turn, is the opposite of a lovely thing for patients and the rest of society.
NYC Nurses Strike Began On Monday
The NYC nurses strike struck on January 12, when around 15,000 nurses essentially said “I Can’t Go for That (No Can Do)” about their current pay and working conditions and walked off their job at hospitals within the Mount Sinai, Montefiore and NewYork-Presbyterian systems. Since then the New York State Nurses Association—the union representing the nurses—has been engaging in negotiations with hospital management. The union has been arguing for pay increases and increased measures to protect the safety of nurses. After talks at the beginning of the week stalled, a federal mediator joined the mix.
But so far, there are no signs that they are anywhere close to any agreement. In a statement, Angela Karafazli, a NewYork-Presbyterian spokeswoman, described the union’s proposals as “unreasonable.” Meanwhile, the New York State Nurses Association deemed the progress as “very little” and indicated that it “put forward a revised set of proposals that hospital executives rejected without offering a counter proposal.”
Kaiser Permanente Nurses Strike Planned
That’s not the only striking news in the U.S. The United Nurses Associations of California/Union of Health Care Professionals have already delivered a 10-day notice that over 31,000 nurses and other health care professionals at Kaiser Permanente intend to go on strike on Monday, January 26. Yep, on what also happens to be National Peanut Brittle Day, expect nurses at nearly 20 hospitals and over 200 clinics in the Kaiser system throughout California and Hawaii to walk off their jobs. The union has been arguing that Kaiser has billions of dollars in financial reserves and investments at Kaiser, yet continue to understaff its healthcare facilities and pile increasing workloads onto healthcare professionals while not providing wages that have kept pace with rising costs of housing, food, and health care.
Nurses Strike Is Not Surprising Given Ongoing Burnout Problem Among All Healthcare Professionals
All of this should be about as shocking as people arguing over social media. A report issued by the U.S. Surgeon General in 2022 entitled “Addressing Health Worker Burnout: The U.S. Surgeon General’s Advisory on Building a Thriving Health Workforce” deemed the U.S. healthcare system as “A system already at a breaking point.” The report served as a call to address the long-increasing problem of healthcare worker burnout. The report stated that “Even before the COVID-19 pandemic, the National Academy of Medicine found that burnout had reached ‘crisis levels. among the U.S. health workforce, with 35-54% of nurses and physicians and 45-60% of medical students and residents reporting symptoms of burnout.”
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 Frank Costanza 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
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.
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.
Meanwhile, 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. A nurses strike can have reverberating effects as the existing work then gets passed on to other already overstretched healthcare professionals like doctors, physical therapists and technicians.
