A year ago, the unthinkable happened. For the first time, a person was diagnosed with Ebola in the United States. A Liberian man, Thomas Eric Duncan, infected two nurses in a Dallas hospital before he died. Nurses across the country were shocked, including Boston Medical Center's Karen Higgins, a nurse for 40 years and co-president of the largest nurses’ union in the country, National Nurses United.

WHEN I saw my first red blanket as a young medical student, I thought little of it. One morning, as I rushed around a hospital in California on my daily rounds, I spotted an old man who lay in bed beneath a scarlet cover, a sharp contrast to the white linens wrapped around the other patients. He looked unremarkable, and I assumed he brought the blanket from home. So I moved on. He wasn’t my patient, anyway.

The National Labor Relations Board’s Office of the General Counsel has issued a consolidated complaint against Community Health Systems Inc. (CHS), the parent company of a nationwide chain of hospitals that includes Greenbrier Valley Medical Center and Bluefield Regional Medical Center.

WATSONVILLE >> A federal labor agency alleges that the parent company of Watsonville Community Hospital and six other subsidiary hospitals engaged in unfair labor practices in violation of the National Labor Relations Act.

In 1877, Rutherford B. Hayes became the first president to make a strong case for universally available public education. “Universal suffrage should rest upon universal education,” he said in his inaugural address, adding that “liberal and permanent provision should be made for the support of free schools.” Hayes, a Republican, didn’t worry that some poor kid might benefit from access to “free stuff,” nor did he believe that the children of wealthy elites should be excluded from the universal nature of the program. For him, education was the basis for full economic and political participation, and full participation was the basis for all prosperity. An education should be available to all regardless of anyone’s station.