When you’re in a hospital bed, two things determine the care you get: whether the person treating you is rested and focused, and whether the hospital answers to patients or to a balance sheet. Right now, Michigan is failing on both.

End forced overtime for nurses.

There’s currently no law in Michigan limiting how many consecutive hours a nurse can be forced to work. After a scheduled 12-hour shift, nurses can be required to keep going – 16 hours, 18 hours – with no right to say no. After a 12-hour shift, even our best and brightest start to lose focus. And with burnout driving nurses out of the profession, we can’t afford to keep asking them to.

The fix is already moving. Senate Bills 296 and 297 – bipartisan legislation sponsored by a Democrat and a Republican together – would ban mandatory overtime outside of declared emergencies, guarantee nurses eight hours of rest after a 12-hour shift, and protect them from retaliation for refusing unsafe hours. The Senate passed them this spring. Eighteen other states already have these protections.

Now the bills sit in the House. I’ll be a vote to get them to the Governor’s desk.

Rein in hospital consolidation.

Across Michigan, hospital systems keep merging – and every merger means fewer choices for you. Medical monopolies limit your options, drive prices up, and force families to change providers every other visit. When one system owns every hospital within an hour’s drive, “shopping around” isn’t a real option, and they know it.

I’ll fight for real oversight of hospital consolidation, so mergers get approved only when they’re good for patients – not just for executives.

Nurses are the backbone of our healthcare system, and patients are the point of it. It’s time Lansing acted like it.