The brief strike launched Wednesday by more than 75,000 workers in the sprawling Kaiser Permanente healthcare system won’t badly hurt other companies right now, but points to potential trouble later this year if the two sides can’t cut a deal.
The iShares U.S. Medical Devices ETF was down 1% while the S&P 500 climbed slightly. Shares of Medtronic dropped 0.2%. Abbott Laboratories fell 0.7%. The calculus would be different if the workers walk out again in November. The unions said that a second strike would be larger and longer. The Kaiser strike is the largest yet to hit the healthcare sector. Due to Kaiser’s scale, it has more potential than its predecessors to affect the sector’s publicly traded companies. Kaiser, a nonprofit, operates both a health plan and a network of 39 hospitals and hundreds of medical facilities. It says it serves 12.7 million people in eight states and the District of Columbia.
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