Healthcare/Airline Meltdowns - Neoliberal Failures - Connecting the dots to Mulgre/RandiCare - Aetna can become Southwest Air

Are entire parts of the economy, mostly under privatized profit making corporate control, coming apart at the seams? Transportation (rails and air), Healthcare meltdowns as Covid exposed the flaws in a profit making system. Note how many urgent care places are popping up. Note how many covid testing sites are all over the place. Note how healthcare professionals are stressed to the point of leaving. (Three of my doctors have retired in the past 5 months). Fact is Medicare - traditional medicare run by the federal government is one of the few bulwarks to meltdowns and Mulgrew/Weingarten are trying to undermine it by making it a sieve for more money to flow to profit but they try to fool people by branding Medicare Adv as just a version of Medicare. Does it Remind you of charter schools claiming to be public schools? See James' take down of leadership.

ICEUFT Blog

UFT INCONSISTENCY ON PRIVATIZING SCHOOLS VS HEALTHCARE COULD COME BACK TO BITE US

Meltdowns. If Mulgrew loses in the city council will Unity melt down?

If you can be there Jan. 4, 9 and 19th. De La Rosa is the target - she has been selling herself as a progressive - she won't live this one down. See A Message to NYC Council.

 

Tuesday, Jan. 3, 2022

The hits keep coming in - I started this blog post 5 days ago - the goal here is to link the attempted move of retirees to privatized Medicare Advantage as part of the 5 decade old neo-liberal project of both political parties. Medicare has been a target since almost its beginning in the 60s. But there's work to do as breaking events keep coming. Before I get to the stuff I wrote before the latest info, here are a few updated links:

• Listen: ‘Let The Mayor Do His Own Dirty Work’ City Council Urged To Stand Strong Against Medicare Advantage Switcheroo

• By Bob Hennelly with Joe Maniscalco
• “I guess the MLC and the mayor decided they wanted retirees to ring in the New Year with a ‘Screw you — we’re gonna do this when you’re not looking!”

New Year’s Surprise: NYC Council Member De La Rosa Introducing Bill to Help Push Retirees Into Medicare Advantage

By Bob Hennelly

New York City Council Member Carmen De La Rosa, chair of the Council’s Civil Service and Labor Committee, will introduce a bill to change the city’s Administrative Code that’s been sought by Mayor Adams and the Municipal Labor Committee [MLC] to clear the way for its 250,000 retirees to be enrolled in a for-profit, privatized Medicare Advantage plan. (READ MORE)

Overworked, Underpaid And Understaffed: EMS In Crisis As NYC Faces Tridemic-- Work Bites

 

Back to business of trying to tie it all together by looking at the Southwest Airline debacle.

 

Are we in a stage of across the board meltdowns? Blame deregulation and the removal of public oversight.

I'm always trying to look for consistent themes and the recent airline chaos with Southwest struck a parallel with the healthcare crisis we seem to be in the midst of where at times of stress, things break down. And because we don't have built-in resiliency - which I attribute to our entire economic system being in the hands of private industry where profit and shareholder value are king and customer and employee needs are second. 

 

There was a time where many industries did take care about their workforce which they viewed as an investment - they had good salaries - often forced on them by unions - and good pensions -- now rare as they've moved to 401.ks. Many observers believe this trend began in the 70s and accelerated into the increasing attacks on government involvement and regulations - call it the neo-liberal revolution where govt/bad, private/good.

That in the midst of one of the historic health crisis in recent history, our own union leaders would choose to attack one of the successful underpinnings of government over the past almost 60 years - Medicare -- is an astounding breach of faith. The leadership refer to people like me as charlatans -- only interested in political advantage -- like my own health security being threatened at the almost age of 78 is meaningless.  But I will return to this theme in the future. Let me get onto the Southwest story, which is not as simple as presented.

Someone asked me the other day if Southwest will survive -- you know - the Wall St Journal etc says let the market make them pay, not the government. My answer was not only will SW survive, they will probably get bailed out by the government -- and the anti-government people won't say boo. Fact is SW has a monopoly over air travel on certain routes and it is low-cost and if they go under, whole areas won't have service, especially California.

 

The Southwest Airline story is even bigger than we think and the elements of big stock by-backs and dividends and profits over customers and employees is endemic to neoliberal "anything goes" thinking over the past 45 years, which is tied to the decimation of unions (they see unions as violating the free market -- let every employee negotiate their own contract - see charter schools for a perfect example.

So we have been pounding the very idea of Medicare Advantage private health insurance as doing exactly what Southwest has been doing -- profits, high exec compensation, stock buybacks, dividends over customer service. That is the future of Mulgrew/RandiCare. Why have we added RandiCare? Because she is also claiming and promoting Medicare Adv privatized programs as just a version of medicare for all. Randi talk out of 12 sides of her mouth? I'm shocked.

I saw samples of two contrasting editorials on Southwest from the Wall St. Journal and the Washington Post. The Post discussed the money that went to shareholder value instead of upgrading the system and called for government intervention. But who? Mayor Pete who doesn't want to offend potential corporate supporters for his future presidential ventures? He may go down as one of the biggest failures as transportation czar - don't forget his role in screwing the railway workers.

• Was Pete Buttigieg Asleep at the Switch for Southwest Airlines ...

Bernie Sanders called for major fines for airlines. Let's not forget the scam they all pulled in taking a lot of pandemic money to keep people on the payroll and then drove people to retire. 

I met a bunch of Southwest Airline pilots who put on a silent demo on Wall St. a couple of weeks ago.

 

Southwest Airlines pilots union official describes how ...

CBS News · CBS News

Below are a few articles from the NYT, WAPO and LATimes

Learning From the Southwest Airlines Fiasco

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/29/opinion/southwest-airlines.html

I’d love to write a scathing, muckraking column about the destructive effects of corporate greed. But that doesn’t seem to be the main story here.

To be clear, greed surely played some role in the disaster. Most obviously, Southwest hadn’t spent the money needed to upgrade a scheduling system many people inside the airline knew was inadequate. Instead, before the pandemic it spent billions on stock buybacks.

The roots of Southwest’s unique meltdown go back all the way to 1978, when the airline industry was deregulated. Until then, interstate carriers were basically forced to offer direct, “point to point” service between cities. After deregulation, most major airlines shifted to “hub and spoke” systems, which had many passengers changing planes at major centers like Chicago’s O’Hare or Atlanta.

Hub-and-spoke has some clear advantages over point-to-point. It lets airlines service the same number of cities with fewer routes — connecting 10 cities point-to-point requires 45 routes but sending everyone via a central hub requires only nine. The system also creates some inherent flexibility because planes and flight crews based at hubs can be reallocated to compensate for, say, equipment breakdowns.

But a hub-and-spoke system has disadvantages, too. It can force passengers to accept long layovers or, alternatively, miss tight connections if anything goes wrong. (Dear American Airlines: No, I did not appreciate my recent involuntary night in Miami.) Hub-and-spoke has also enhanced airlines’ monopoly power, with each big carrier dominating markets served by its hubs.

Some analysts have suggested that Southwest’s debacle reflected a widespread managerial culture that encourages “cheeseparing” — increasing profits by slicing off costs until there’s no margin for error. For example, a relentless focus on holding down expenses was at the root of worker anger that almost shut down America’s freight railways not long ago.

I’m sympathetic to that view. We’d probably all be better off if corporations were less focused on their short-term bottom lines and more willing to invest in resilience. And public policy should do what it can to promote such investment.

Beyond that, what happened at Southwest is another reminder that, for all the talk of an information age, we’re still living in a material world. Notably, there’s a clear family resemblance between the Southwest meltdown and the supply chain crisis of 2021-22, when a constellation of unusual events left many of the shipping containers central to modern commerce stranded in the wrong places.

 

 

Praising dereg but no competition

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/12/28/southwest-holiday-cancellations-investors-customers/

Opinion Southwest put investors ahead of its customers and employees

By the Editorial Board

 

Southwest Airlines was the grinch that stole this year’s Christmas for travelers across the country. The airline has canceled more than 15,000 flights since Dec. 22, stranding passengers and crew for days. Even worse were the horror stories of passengers unable to reach customer assistance, let alone rebook their flights, and sleeping en masse at airports. While every other U.S. airline managed to get back on track shortly after the rough Christmas week weather, Southwest has only seen its problems escalate: It accounted for more than 90 percent of Wednesday’s flight cancellations by U.S. airlines and about 99 percent of Thursday’s — a full week after the winter storm initially hit the Midwest. This is no longer about weather affecting flights. It’s about basic competence, and Southwest deserves a failing grade.

At a minimum, Southwest should fully compensate affected passengers and swiftly upgrade its outdated computer system. Giving full refunds for canceled flights and paying for food and hotel stays are the least the airline can do. But nothing can make up for missed holiday meals and hugs with family or having to forgo highly anticipated vacations. Many customers can’t even rebook on Southwest until Saturday — or later. Getting their baggage back is yet another nightmare.

The core problem is Southwest’s failure to modernize its infrastructure. Casey Murray, president of the Southwest Airlines Pilots Association, told CNN the airline still uses phones and a computing system from three decades ago. While 1990s fashion might be back en vogue for teenagers, that era’s data processors should not be running one of the nation’s largest airlines in 2022. The system was unable to figure out where crews were, making it impossible to match up pilots, flight attendants and planes.

 Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg has called the situation “unacceptable” and plans to investigate the meltdown. “From what I can tell, Southwest is unable to locate even where their own crews are, let alone their own passengers, let alone baggage,” he said.

What’s particularly egregious is the fact that Southwest had the money to upgrade its systems but chose to hand it to shareholders instead. The airline recently announced it would pay a dividend again that amounts to $428 million a year. Southwest also received more than $7 billion from the U.S. federal government to shore up its operations during the pandemic. It paid a quarterly dividend for years before the coronavirus struck, signaling to Wall Street that the airline had cash to spare.

In other words, given a choice, Southwest put its investors ahead of its customers and crew. Now, the full ramifications of those decisions are causing massive pain — and what will almost certainly be a collapse of trust from the budget-minded travelers who have consistently ranked it among the best airlines when it comes to customer satisfaction.

Chief Executive Bob Jordan is promising to make needed upgrades and has vowed to “go above and beyond” for those who have been impacted.

But the fact is, Southwest should have seen the debacle coming and averted it long before now. This isn’t the first time Southwest has had this kind of systemwide meltdown. In October 2021, the airline canceled more than 2,000 flights over four days, blaming bad weather in Florida. The ordeal cost the airline $75 million. Executives apologized and handed out vouchers to irate customers. As recently as Dec. 21, The Post reported, an internal company memo foreshadowed the current crisis. As the storm was preparing to hit, the memo warned, Southwest’s Denver operation was reaching a “state of operational emergency” because of an “unusually high number of absences” of ramp employees, who handle baggage and help planes park at gates.

Southwest markets itself as a different kind of carrier — a plucky, friendly one that shook up the stodgy airline industry in the 1970s to make jet travel easier, more flexible and more affordable. The airline prides itself on its corporate culture, unfailingly nice employees, cabins where there are no seat assignments and fares that are often among the cheapest to be found. Its logo is in the shape of a heart, and its stock symbol is LUV. All of that — as well as Southwest’s bottom line — has now been put at risk by its leadership’s shortsighted decisions to ignore needed investments while tending to investors.

 

 https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2022-12-28/how-southwest-airlines-meltdown-happened

Far from a shock, Southwest meltdown was ‘perfect storm’ of well-known vulnerabilities 

As chaos at Southwest Airlines brought misery to thousands of frustrated travelers and growing scrutiny from U.S. regulators and lawmakers, many in the aviation industry said the massive cancellation of flights by the nation’s largest domestic carrier was far from surprising.

Industry experts and union leaders for Southwest employees cited the company’s outdated technology and vulnerable operations, both of which are particularly susceptible to any disruptions, much less multiple coast-to-coast weather events.

“This was the perfect storm,” William McGee, a senior fellow focused on aviation for the American Economic Liberties Project. “Other [airlines] dealt with this and came back from this; Southwest was sort of brought to its knees. It deserves to be blamed for not being more resilient.”

Of the more than 3,000 flights canceled Tuesday across the U.S., about 85% were Southwest’s, according to the flight tracking website FlightAware. Thousands of the airline’s passengers were stranded in airports across the nation — not to mention its crew members. In California, hundreds of flights have been delayed or canceled through the end of the week — making up much of the Southwest schedule.

The U.S. Department of Transportation said this week it plans an inquiry into the source of the airline’s massive problems.

Although the company acknowledged delays and cancellations and blamed most of the headaches on bad weather, leaders have offered little explanation or plans for relief.

“Our heartfelt apologies for this are just beginning,” the airline said in a statement. “We recognize falling short and sincerely apologize.”

Michael Santoro, vice president of the Southwest Airlines Pilots Assn., said Southwest has failed to invest in an updated software system used for flight routing and staffing, which is crucial to avoid continual problems.

“The catalyst was the big storm,” Santoro said in an interview. “But our internal software can’t handle massive cancellations. The company hasn’t invested the money into scheduling infrastructure to support the network they have developed.

“So pilots are calling in asking, I’m done with this flight — where do I go next? Am I running another plane? Do I spend the night here? And pilots are on hold for hours trying to figure out what to do next.”

The cancellations are expected to continue. Southwest Chief Executive Bob Jordan told the Wall Street Journal the airline planned to operate at around one-third of regular capacity as it tries to regroup and get the schedule back on track.

“This is not hyperbole, I’ve never seen an airline meltdown of this size and magnitude,” said McGee, who has worked in and around U.S. airlines for almost four decades.

Although McGee and union leaders pointed directly to technology shortcomings for the unprecedented delays this week, experts said they could also be due in part to the way Southwest does business. The U.S. airline giant has no partnerships with other airlines to assist with rebookings, it operates with few open seats or backup crews and its unique flight patterns — running from destination to destination instead of in and out of certain hubs — leave little room for error, meaning delays can quickly spiral.

“They just keep domino-ing and cascading,” McGee said. “It will take weeks to try to just accommodate all the people who have been displaced.”

Southwest’s flight patterns mean that “if one flight is canceled or delayed, it’s going to make a mess for everyone the whole day,” said Brian Sumers, editor of the Airline Observer newsletter. “It’s a complicated airline.”

Santoro said Southwest’s point-to-point network is “super-complex” but works well when there are no unforeseen storms. “It’s a great network,” he said. “It just needs to be supported correctly, and it hasn’t been.”

Michael Massoni, first vice president of Transport Workers Union Local 556, said the flight attendants union has complained about Southwest’s “antiquated technology” for a decade.

“When you have a weather event, airplanes get stuck and crews get stuck,” Massoni said. “But the software literally can’t keep up with where the airplanes are and where the flight attendants are.”

What ensues, he said, is “chaos,” and Southwest’s only option is to deal with the problem manually. 

Union officials agree with the company that the flight interruptions are not due to staffing issues, saying there were enough pilots and crews scheduled for the holidays.

With existing software, “the network spirals out of control,” Capt. Casey Murray, president of the Southwest Airlines Pilots Assn., said in a statement to members. “The company’s failed solution? Hire more. ... We aren’t undermanned. … Even with the correct number of pilots on any given day, the house of cards fails, and fail it does with ever-increasing frequency and severity.”

Many industry analysts said there’s still much to investigate about this breakdown.

“We just don’t know what’s really happened there to cause such an unprecedented cancellation pattern,” said Kathleen Bangs, spokesperson for FlightAware. “What was the system failure?”

The record for most U.S. flight cancellations in 2022 was set Feb. 3 — when a storm in the South and Midwest briefly closed Dallas Fort Worth International Airport — but that was surpassed Dec. 23, Bangs said.

In February, many flights were preemptively canceled to deal with the weather, but Southwest didn’t take that step this past week, she said.

“With it being the holidays, it’s really tough to preemptively cancel flights,” Bangs said. “It just really backfired.”

The chaos at Southwest prompted criticism from federal lawmakers as well.

Sens. Edward J. Markey (D-Mass.) and Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.), members of the Senate Commerce Committee, said Southwest should not be able to claim flight cancellations were caused by recent winter storms, which would allow the airline to avoid reimbursing travelers.

Compensation should include not only rebooked flights, refunds, hotels, meals and transportation but also “significant monetary compensation for the disruption to their holiday plans,” the two senators said in a statement.

Southwest’s meltdown reached the Oval Office, with President Biden posting on Twitter that airlines would be held responsible and directing aggrieved travelers to the Department of Transportation website to determine whether they’re entitled to compensation.

“Our administration is working to ensure airlines are held accountable,” Biden tweeted Tuesday.

Sen. Maria Cantwell (D-Wash.), chair of the Senate Commerce Committee, said Tuesday that the committee will examine the causes of the disruptions and their effects on consumers.

“The problems at Southwest Airlines over the last several days go beyond weather,” Cantwell said in a statement. “Many airlines fail to adequately communicate with consumers during flight cancellations. Consumers deserve strong protections, including an updated consumer refund rule.”

Furious and weary travelers flooded Southwest on Twitter with reports of long lines that extended outside airport terminals, missing luggage that in some cases traveled onward despite canceled flights or piled up unclaimed for days. Southwest passengers were also forced to wait hours to reach consumer support representatives on the phone or were repeatedly getting disconnected, and struggled to navigate a glitchy website.

Passengers are blaming Southwest workers for the delays, Santoro said, which has become embarrassing. 

“We apologize and apologize,” Santoro said. “But it’s not our fault. We’re ready to work. We’re showing up. But we just need Southwest to put us on an airplane — tell us which airplane to fly.”

LEVER TIME: How The Airline Industry Became A Living Nightmare

After the Southwest Airlines debacle that saw over 2,500 flights canceled and up to a million travelers stranded over the holidays, David Sirota explores how the U.S. airline industry became one of the most concentrated and despised industries in the country with the help of William J. McGee, a senior fellow for aviation and travel at the American Economic Liberties Project.

Click Here To Listen To This Week's Episode

William explains to David the history of airline deregulation and the federal preemption that left oversight of the industry solely in the questionable hands of the Secretary of Transportation.

A rough transcript of this episode is available here.