Until I retired this August at age 55, I worked at Claxton-Hepburn Medical Center for 35 years, my entire career as a Radiologic and CT Technologist. The hospital is located in Ogdensburg, New York, a city of roughly 10,000 people on the southern shore of the St. Lawrence River along the Canadian border.

We’re about 400 miles north of New York City, and we serve the largest county in the state, St. Lawrence County. It is a large rural area where transportation is often an obstacle to health care services and employment.

When I joined the hospital in 1991, most of the staff were represented by 1199SEIU or NYSNA. All of the service, maintenance, clerical and LPN staff were in 1199SEIU. But the Radiology, Cardiology, Respiratory, Operating Room and Laboratory Techs were not. I could never understand why.

In 2022 after COVID, our veteran radiology staff knew how much traveling nursing staff were continuing to be paid and we had not been able to get an increase in our pay or on-call pay for several years.

These temporary workers did not care about our hospital and were not invested in its future. Compounded with the unpredictability of health insurance costs under a new hospital plan, this helped sway my co-workers to vote yes.

I’m glad we were able to unionize and reach a favorable agreement, but I do worry about the future.

Being a rural hospital means we have lower Medicaid reimbursement rates than our downstate counterparts, while a large share of our patients rely on Medicaid and Medicare for coverage.

The idea of joining the two Critical Access Hospitals together under the North Star Health Alliance umbrella was that there would be more money available for patient care. It didn’t work out that way.

People don’t realize that things could get even worse. With the cuts to Medicaid funding written into the so-called "Big Ugly Bill," there will be even less money available to plug funding gaps in rural areas.

“I may have retired from my job, but I’m definitely planning to stay active with 1199!”