Morning Briefing
Summaries of health policy coverage from major news organizations
Millions Of People Don Scrubs For Health Care's Many Middle Class Jobs
The New York Times: Health Care Opens Stable Career Path, Taken Mainly By Women
The daughter of a teacher’s aide and a gas station manager, Ms. Waugh, like many other hard-working and often overlooked Americans, has secured a spot in a profoundly transformed middle class. While the group continues to include large numbers of people sitting at desks, far fewer middle-income workers of the 21st century are donning overalls. Instead, reflecting the biggest change in recent years, millions more are in scrubs. ... In 1980, 1.4 million jobs in health care paid a middle class wage: $40,000 to $80,000 a year in today’s money. Now, the figure is 4.5 million. The pay of registered nurses — now the third-largest middle-income occupation and one that continues to be overwhelmingly female — has risen strongly along with the increasing demands of the job. The median salary of $61,000 a year in 2012 was 55 percent greater, adjusted for inflation, than three decades earlier. (Searcey, Porter and Gabeloff, 2/22)
USA Today: Home Care Workers Rally For Higher Wages
Home care workers are joining a nationwide movement to raise the wages of low-paid Americans with meetings and rallies in more than 20 cities the next two weeks. The campaign, which kicks off Monday in Carson City, Nev., was inspired by fast food and retail worker protests the past two years that helped spark minimum wage hikes in many states and prompted Walmart to boost its pay floor last week. Home care aides joined some of those rallies, but this is their first independent push. (Davidson, 2/22)
