Do you wish that your nurse had a gag order preventing her from speaking up on behalf of patients? Should RNs be fired for reporting on hospital safety errors? What about prosecuted for blowing the whistle on quack doctors or heartless healthcare corporations?
Unfortunately this is exactly what too many hospitals are trying to do in our nation today. While the healthcare bill may have passed, there remain life and death patient safety and care issues that we as a nation need to address.
If you are a supporter of America's nurses, please read what we're talking about, below, and then offer your solidarity with RNs. We believe this story will outrage you.
For anyone not interested in slogging through the debate on the 500-odd amendments to the Baucus bill, it has become increasingly and painfully apparent that the healthcare legislation soon to emerge from at least the Senate will fall far short in reigning in out of control health care costs.
That lapse is especially ironic in that "affordability" is perhaps the only goal that seems to top everyone's to do list, from President Obama to the "keep the government hands off my (government-financed) Medicare" crowd.
But as long as our policy makers refuse to throw the elephant out of the room, the insurance company pirates and their predatory pricing practices, all their subsidies and tweaking will amount to little more than an umbrella in a hurricane.
It's time to stop talking about make believe death panels, and talk about the real ones.
Six of California's biggest insurance companies have rejected more than one in five claims the past seven years -- according to data the insurance giants, Blue Cross, PacifiCare, Kaiser Permanente, Health Net, Cigna, and Aetna report to the state Department of Managed Care.
There's a fundamental lesson in collective bargaining that seems to have been lost on the White House, and those in Congress who devised their failing strategy on healthcare reform:
Don't make all your compromises before you walk in the room.
Aug. 5 -- More than a hundred CNA/NNOC registered nurses rallied on the steps of the University of California San Francisco Medical Center today with a simple message for the public: California and the nation's hospitals are not prepared to handle the H1N1 influenza, known as swine flu, when it hits the country full force this fall, and frontline registered nurses, other healthcare workers, patients, and the public are all in serious jeopardy.
Enough already on the handwringing over the plan to start taxing employee healthcare benefits.
The tax is not a threat to the type of reform plan expected to emerge from Congress. It's a central element -- to pay for the massive public bailout of the health insurance industry and as a backdoor way to cut costs by discouraging people from seeking medical care.
(Who knew? American exceptionalism has very dark side when it comes to healthcare. - promoted by Paul Rosenberg)
As our favorite politicos fall all over each other to see who can further erode the healthcare package likely to emerge from Congress, it's worth recalling that there is another way.But first, get a glimpse of the latest fiasco moving forward in the Senate Finance Committee, where Max Baucus is leading the charge to develop the all important "bi-partisan" reform bill.
Today's news is that "everyone's smiling" -- says Kent Conrad, author of the embarrassingly weak proposal for "non-profit coops" as an alternative to the public option, much less the real reform, single payer.
Why? Because they've found a way to cut the price tag by $400 billion. How?
largely by reducing the amount of subsidies for low-income individuals to buy insurance
Well, thank goodness. At least that means less public money going into the pockets of the already gorged insurance giants.
Too bad it means more people are likely to go bankrupt or self-ration needed care when Congress passes a bill forcing everyone to buy insurance with no meaningful limits on what the private insurers can charge.
Is there another route? Yes, and it's not a secret.
Is the public option that some have deemed the sword we should all fall on in the healthcare debate little more than fool's gold?
In the wake of the now widely touted New York Times poll this weekend that showed 85 percent of Americans believe our health care system should be fundamentally changed or completely rebuilt and that people are even willing to pay more in taxes to get that kind of system, the next question ought to be why are Democrats and some liberal constituency groups willing to settle for so little?
From the news pages to the blogs, some progressive activists are counting up the votes and what can be done to persuade 12 recalcitrant Senators and a number of insurance industry fans in the House to vote for a "robust" public option.
Today's meeting of the nation's leading single payer activists with Sen. Max Baucus was historic, and a recognition of the power of the tens of thousands of nurses, doctors, and grassroots activists across the country who have been turning up the heat on the policy makers in Washington.
Make no mistake - your voices are being heard. And, the protests and pressure will continue.
As Rose Ann DeMoro, executive director of the California Nurses Association/National Nurses Organizing Committee, told Baucus, "there is a groundswell" across the country that will continue to press for single payer reform, and Baucus and other policy makers in Washington "are going to get to know us very well." In a later press conference, DeMoro blasted the conventional wisdom that single payer is not politically viable. "Is it politically viable to let people die and suffer from a lack of political will?" Noting the fight for women's suffrage and the civil rights movement, she emphasized, "we're going to have to turn up the heat. Women did not get the right to vote by voting on it."
With Max Baucus' Senate Finance Committee continuing to shut out the voices of single payer advocates while rolling out the red carpet for the insurance giants and other health care corporations, five more were arrested today and dozens of other nurses stood before the committee in a dramatic silent protest.
Today's action -- the second in a week that led to 8 arrests -- coincided with the anniversary of the birth of Nightingale. It also marked the kickoff of two days of actions by nurses from around the country who are pressing for a legislative agenda for quality nursing care and a single standard of quality care for all.
Tuesday, May 12, is Florence Nightingale Day--and the chance to honor our first nurse with a "revolt of the nurses and doctors" protest against Sen. Max Baucus and the health insurance corporations who are doing their best to undermine healthcare reform, this time by excluding all mention of single-payer healthcare reforms from the Senate Finance debate over healthcare financing.
We urge all nurses and doctors and patients who are in the Washington D.C. area to join the Florence Nightingale Day protests this Tuesday from 10 a.m. to 12 noon right outside the Dirksen Senate Office Building, at 1st St. and Constitution Ave., right near Union Station in Washington, D.C. (Caregivers, wear your scrubs!)
Is this a turning point in the single-payer debate? Will the DC insiders be forced to listen to the public and healthcare activists--and not just big-money healthcare donors?
Both AP and Politico are reporting on the events at this morning's Senate Finance Committee, where brave healthcare activists, one after the other, stood up to protest the exclusion of single-payer reforms from the conversation.
(Much more going on around universal healthcare than the usual Beltway Banditry dominating the news. - promoted by Paul Rosenberg)
In Canada, it took the dogged determination of one province, Saskatchewan, and a visionary leader Tommy Douglas, to pave the path to a national health care system, which they call Medicare.
For all the detractors of the Canadian system in the studios of Fox News and the board rooms of rightwing think tanks, consider this one note: In 2004, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation conducted a national poll to select the greatest Canadian of all time. The winner in a landslide --Tommy Douglas.
While the federal window remains open for reform, with two national single payer bills, John Conyers' HR 676 in the House and now Bernie Sanders' S 703 in the Senate, many nurses, doctors, and health activists are turning to the states to lead as well.
Hundreds of people, nurses, doctors, medical students, grassroots activists, and California School Employees Association members gathered in downtown Los Angeles Monday to deliver an unequivocal message about the nature of the healthcare reform Americans so desperately need.
For those inside the tightly scripted White House Forum or anyone watching the live feed on line, that message was blacked out. Inside the pre-selected speakers kept within the accepted framework: we need reform, costs are out of control, Americans are hurting, and preventive care will solve all our problems ('fraid not). Unfortunately nothing proposed in the forum is likely to cure this crisis.
With the final White House Forum on healthcare scheduled Monday, April 6 in downtown Los Angeles, advocates of single payer/guaranteed healthcare have one more opportunity to shake up what has become a dreary conventional wisdom about the presumed acceptable parameters of the debate.
Hundreds of nurses, doctors, healthcare and labor activists will rally at 9 a.m. outside the California Endowment, 1000 North Alameda St., Los Angeles.
It will mark the fifth time, at all five White House regional forums, that the single payer/Medicare for all message will come to the stage, outside and inside the forum. You can extend that to the town hall meeting at the White House last week where the President was asked why we can't have a national healthcare system like they have in other industrialized nations.
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