I did everything they told us to do. Go to work. Show up. Take care of people. Esther Reyes does — she cleans rooms at an HCA hospital in El Paso for sixteen dollars and eighty cents an hour. Single mother, three kids. Some months she pays the water bill. Other months she pays for gas. She doesn’t get both.
Meanwhile HCA pulled in $6.8 billion in profit last year. Six. Point. Eight. Billion. And in early 2026 they authorized a $10 billion stock buyback — ten billion fucking dollars to make shareholders richer while the woman mopping the floor decides between water and gasoline.
CEO Sam Hazen took home $26.5 million in 2025. That’s 420 times what the median HCA employee makes. Four hundred and twenty times. The median worker — sixty-two thousand a year — can barely keep the lights on, and the man running the place hauls a paycheck that would fund hundreds of those workers.
And when nurses asked Nevada Republican Governor Joe Lombardo to pass safer staffing ratios — so they don’t have to walk away from a crying parent in a hallway — he vetoed it. Vetoed patient safety because the for-profit hospital lobby doesn’t want a limit on how many bodies one nurse has to carry.
Then HCA’s spokesperson had the goddamn audacity to say that portraying staffing as a patient safety issue is “inaccurate.” Inaccurate. Tell that to Jody Domineck, the nurse who had to walk away from a parent whose child was having a procedure because she had too many other patients. Tell that to every family sitting in an HCA room wondering if the nurse assigned to them is stretched across three hallways.
This is the deal. The for-profit hospital system makes billions. The CEO clears $26.5 million. The stock buyback is $10 billion. And the worker cleaning the rooms can’t pay her water bill. The nurse can’t comfort a scared parent. And the governor makes damn sure nobody forces the company to fix it.
They call it healthcare. It’s extraction with a stethoscope. The workers are asking for $25 an hour — twenty-five fucking dollars — and the company says that’s “about compensation, not patient safety.” You’re goddamn right it’s about compensation. It’s about the fact that the people who keep your hospital running can’t survive on what you pay them while you shower shareholders with billions.
HCA doesn’t have a staffing problem. They have a greed problem. Every Republican who vetoed a safety standard, every executive who approved that buyback, every spokesperson who called patient safety “inaccurate” — they know exactly what they’re doing. They just don’t give a shit about the people doing the work.
Eat shit, HCA. You knew exactly what you were doing.
Source story: 22,000 HCA workers seek $25 hourly minimum in contract talks.