On Tuesday, May 10, 2011, at 10:30 a.m., EDT, Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT) and Representative Jim McDermott (D-WA), will hold a joint news conference at the Senate Swamp to announce the introduction of the American Health Security Act of 2011 (the Act).

The Act establishes a national healthcare program that requires each participating state to set up and administer comprehensive health care services as an entitlement for all through a progressively financed, single-payer system, as administered by the states. Benefits emphasize primary and preventive care, and free choice of providers. Private health insurance sold by for-profit companies continues in the form of supplemental coverage only.

The American Health Security Act of 2011 has the support of National Nurses United, the California Nurses Association, the Labor Caucus for Single-Payer and its member unions, the Labor Campaign for Single Payer, and the AFL-CIO which, at its convention in Pittsburgh in 2009, unanimously passed Resolution 34 in support of single-payer health care under a social insurance model and recently reaffirmed its support in its executive council resolution addressing national deficit reduction (March 2011).

“Providing a single standard of high quality care for all is a priority for registered nurses who have seen their abilities to act as patient advocates made more difficult as for-profit interests control more patient care decisions. We commend Senator Sanders and Representative McDermott for their vision and passion to help registered nurses create a more just healthcare system through the American Health Security Act and applaud our brother and sisters in labor for their support,” said Jean Ross, R.N. co-president of National Nurses United.

The Act is a manifestation of Congressional findings, including the addition of more than four million uninsured Americans between 2008 and 2009, bringing the total to over 51 million, or more than 1 of every 6 Americans. Businesses are relieved of the burdens of health care administration under the new law.

The Program amends the tax code to create the American Health Security Trust Fund and appropriates to the Fund specified tax revenues, current health program receipts, and tax credits and subsidies under the Affordable Care Act. The tax revenues include a new health care income tax, an employer payroll tax, a surcharge on high income individuals, and a tax on securities and other financial transactions. Transaction taxes include language consistent with other labor efforts around the globe to more fairly fund programs of social uplift.

The federal government would collect and distribute all funds to the states and administrative expenses would be capped at three percent. Each state would have the choice to administer its own program or have the federal Board administer it.

It’s a club I will never be in. Michael Moore told us about them this week. The Forbes 400. The richest 400 people in America. They own more stuff and have more cash and assets than half of the rest of us (roughly 150,000,000+ people) combined.

But I had to dig deeper. It wasn’t offensive enough to me that just 400 people own so much that was as the result of the hard work and suffering of so many of the rest of us. I was willing to bet it was a deeper profile of power in 2011 America than that repugnant statistic alone indicated.

I was right. In the Forbes 400, most of the people are white guys. In fact, 365 are guys. Very few non-white people, and only 35 women are in the club. And Oprah is the only black woman. 365 plus 34 and Oprah.

That just about says what we need to know about our society. It’s a good ol’ mostly white boys and a few mostly white girls plus Oprah club. Their money controls our industries; their industries control our access to the good life or lack thereof. And they are still mostly male, mostly white and drenched in wealth – even 235 years after a bunch of mostly white, all male folks declared that all men had rights unalienable. They weren’t lying about the men part. I’ll give them that.

Sometimes when I am thinking we’ve advanced so far since the Founding Fathers set forth upon this continent a new nation that I forget reality slapping me in the face. I am not on the Forbes 400 or the Forbes 4,000 or the Forbes 4,000,000. And I never will be. I’m a working class white girl.

I guess I will have to content myself with the notion that I’m in a more exclusive club than they are. I am a cancer survivor who weathered financial collapse that followed being an American with inadequate access to healthcare and then had my story told in Michael Moore’s 2007 film, SiCKO. About a dozen of us were featured in that film, and we’re not in the Forbes cohort.

Just yesterday, the report came out that bankruptcies due to medical crisis had not been significantly reduced by the Massachusetts healthcare bill known as RomneyCare, or Chapter 58, the mandated purchase of private insurance, passed in 2006. More than half of all personal bankruptcies still flow from medical crisis and of those going broke, 89 percent had health insurance.

I think that my club, though small, is pretty diverse and full of good-hearted people (men, women and kids of all races, colors, sizes and shapes) who would trade the chance for all the influence and power on earth and a slot on the Forbes 400 list – and our moments of fame in SiCKO — for a transformed healthcare system that provided a single standard of high quality care for all without financial barriers. I like my club better.

Donna Smith is a community organizer for National Nurses United (the new national arm of the California Nurses Association), National Co-Chair for the Progressive Democrats of America Healthcare Not Warfare campaign, and Healthcare-NOW! Steering Committee member.

Marching to defend workers' rights and benefits in Madison

The feeling of solidarity was palpable. The slogan on one T-shirt connected all the issues for the nurses: Union Rights, Human Rights, Patient Rights.

Leslie Curtis, an organizer for NNU, set the tone: “What’s happening in Wisconsin is a fight for all of us.” She held up some of the picket signs we’d be carrying. The one that got the biggest cheer proclaimed, “Don’t Blame Workers for the Crisis, It’s Wall Street Greed.” Then she reminded us when the bus got back to Chicago to “tip our union brother,” our bus driver.

As the bus hit the road, a nurse wearing a Sicko T-shirt walked up the aisle with a box of Joe in one hand and a bag of dairy creamers and paper cups in the other. Following her was another nurse with a box of Einstein bagels and cream cheese. We were all well fed and caffeinated by the time we rolled into Madison two hours later.

On the bus, the nurses had no shortage of health care horror stories. RNs from the University of Chicago Medical Center–which is located on the South Side, a few miles from some of the poorest neighborhoods in the city, talked about the difficult and at times dangerous conditions in the hospital inpatient units and in the emergency room.

Nurse Reasheal Lehmann works in the ER and discussed the overcrowding and long waits–sometimes over 13 hours. That’s because another South Side facility, Provident Hospital of Cook County, just closed its ER to ambulance runs. Now patients are diverted to U of C, which expects eight to 10 more ambulances a day, a 50 percent increase. Since 1986, six South Side hospitals have closed, putting enormous stress on the few health care institutions left to serve low-income and uninsured patients.

Reasheal said some patients that need to be admitted wait in hallways for more than 24 hours until a bed is available. Hospital management has a system called “bed geography” but the nurses report the system doesn’t work. The anger and frustration in the ER leads patients to walk out without being treated.

Among the ER patients who suffer the most, according to Reasheal, are those in sickle cell pain crisis. She said, “Sickle cell is still terrible on the South Side,” and added, “By the time a patient in a pain crisis is seen, they need IV morphine–that’s how bad the pain is.” Another nurse described a flooded ER with water contaminated with human feces. Several rooms had to close. After the blizzard that hit Chicago a few weeks ago, the ER was deluged with dialysis patients who missed dialysis treatment. Most were so sick they had to be admitted to the hospital for stabilization.

The bus burst into laughter when Reasheal called out the tagline that advertises the University of Chicago Medical Center: “At the Forefront of Medicine.”

When asked about the solution to the health care crisis, Mona Cetner, an RN on the inpatient general medicine unit at U of C, said without hesitation, “Single-payer. Health care is a right, not a privilege. Our health care is shameful. We should hang our heads in shame. Medicine shouldn’t be for profit. It’s corporate greed.”

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IN MADISON, the minute we disembarked from the bus, placards in hand, union members came over and thanked the nurses for coming. We marched with them one block to the Capitol building.

Across the street were two semi-trailers with the word Teamsters emblazoned on it and unionists clogged the sidewalk. When they saw the nurses, they started to chant: “Union, Power, Union, Power.” Over and over, hundreds chanted the words, and then the order flipped: “Power, Union, Power, Union.”

We entered the Capitol to the sound of drums and chanting in the near distance. As we marched down a hall lined with workers, smiles all around, people shook the nurses’ hands like they were celebrities, thanked them profusely for supporting their struggle and added, “Thank you for taking care of us.”

Once in the rotunda, the crowd erupted as the nurses, signs held high, marched in and stood behind the drummers in a semi-circle. Reasheal addressed the crowd and said, “Health care is a human right. We are here from Chicago to support your struggle.” A massive cheer went up. There were dozens of signs in the crowd that spoke to the health care crisis including one that asserted, “Mental health care is a human right.”

Then the firefighters marched into the crowd and through the rotunda in full gear, the piercing red and white lights of their battered, black helmets turned on. They high-fived the nurses. The next group of workers was a huge contingent of sheet metal workers. Who knew there were so many sheetmetal workers and what do they do?

Jimmy Hoffa Jr. of the Teamsters showed up, addressed the crowd and invoked the labor slogan, “An injury to one is an injury to all.” After he left, the woman chairing the ongoing mass meeting in the rotunda held up two fingers that signified for the chanting to stop and for people to listen.

Everyone complied. She stood on a plastic milk crate, took the microphone and read out solidarity greetings from Egypt. When she finished the room exploded into whooping and clapping. A new chant began, “We are one, we are one,” and then morphed into, “One, One, One,” over and over again.

But the chant heard consistently throughout the day was “This is what democracy looks like.” And it did–masses of workers from all parts of the state occupying the building where the decisions that affect their lives are made, and demanding to be heard. Solidarity came from every direction and from some unexpected ones: doctors. They wrote sick notes to excuse Capitol protesters from work. Dr. Lou Sanner, a family medicine physician, confessed he wrote hundreds of sick notes for protesters because they were suffering from stress.

The level of day-to-day organization in the Capitol was seamless, the floor spotless. There was a crew that cleaned up constantly. The “people’s pizza,” pepperoni or cheese, was given away. People with platters of vegetables and strawberries, and crates of apples circulated throughout the crowd. Stacks of bottled water were available. An elderly woman offered Girl Scout mint chocolates to the crowd.

A nurse’s station was located on the first floor, and on the second, there was a table with first aid supplies. Next to it was a table piled high with food: containers of hummus, baby carrots, slices of famous Wisconsin cheeses, crackers and bread. Around the corner was a child care area and children drew on large sheets of paper spread out on the floor. In the women’s bathroom, there were boxes of tampons and pads, free for the taking.

Around 2 p.m., it was announced that the legislators were going into session. The drummers and hundreds of protesters dashed up the stairs, but were blocked by police a few feet from the entrance to the chamber. The four drummers started drumming furiously. A trumpet player joined them. The sound was so thunderous that the air vibrated. A chant of, “Go, Go, Go” started.

The words and sounds ricocheted off the stone walls and floors, amplifying the effect to deafening levels. Facebook and Twitter are ways to organize and communicate, but they can’t substitute for the power of booming drums and hundreds of people packed together protesting, voices chanting political slogans. It was a festival of fighters.

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THERE WERE many signs in Madison stating, “It’s not about the money.” But it is about the money. The governor clearly sees it that way. So should labor.

The mainstream media, labor leaders and politicians repeat ad nauseam that state workers “aren’t in it for the money.” Then what are workers “in it for?” For fun, not to pay the bills? The billionaire Koch brothers are in it for the money. Slashing benefits takes money out of workers’ paychecks, and soaring health care costs is the main reason. Walker is more than doubling workers’ contributions toward helath care to a whopping 12.6 percent.

Ann Niemeier, a retired teacher who’d been at the Capitol for over a week, explained, “The poorest workers will be hit the hardest–the nursing home workers and day care workers. They won’t be able to afford the increase. We’ve taken too many concessions. The fight with the governor should be about the benefits, too, not just the right to collective bargaining.”

Over the last decade, family health insurance premiums for Wisconsin workers rose 4.6 times faster than their median earnings. Another reason premiums have increased is because those with insurance pay a “hidden health tax”–$1,017 yearly on average, according to the estimates of researchers–in money that goes to pay for the care hospitals provide to the uninsured.

Wisconsin has between 300,000 and 500,000 uninsured, and 110,000 are children. Walker’s budget also proposes changes in Medicaid and BadgerCare that would eliminate thousands from eligibility from both programs.

The National Nurses United support a strategy of “No Concessions.” Executive Director Rose Ann DeMoro threw down the gauntlet when she wrote a few days ago, “There can be no more concessions, period.”

The NNU is one of the main supporters of a single-payer, national health care system. A single-payer system abolishes employment-based health coverage and is the only way to get bargaining for health care out of every union contract and to make health care a human right for all.

February’s single-payer newsletter includes these articles:

Dr. King and Health Reform
By Claudia Fegan, M.D. – “There are 50 million Americans who are uninsured. African Americans are represented disproportionately among the uninsured. I am referring to the fact that while we represent only 12 percent of the population, we are 20 percent of the uninsured.”

Vermont Governor Lays Out Details for Single Payer Pathway
The Shumlin administration released the legislative details of how to move the state to a single payer healthcare system, with the first steps beginning this summer.

Nurse Protest Prompts Blue Shield to Delay Rate Hike
Blue Shield of California announced a 60-day reprieve for the unconscionable rate hike of up to 59 percent it intends to foist on individuals and families. The announcement coincided with announced plans by nurses, patients, and consumer advocates who stormed Blue Shield’s posh California corporate headquarters in downtown San Francisco.

Will You Cry for Me, John Boehner?
Because we know Speaker of the House Boehner has an emotional side, we want to tell him our stories of struggle – the stories that make us cry – in hopes that instead of pretending to repeal health reform, we should start talking about real improved Medicare for all reform. Over 1,600 people have signed the letter to Mr. Boehner so far. Have you?

House Republicans Consider Privatizing Medicare
Months after they hammered Democrats for cutting Medicare, House Republicans are debating whether to relaunch their quest to privatize the health program for seniors. House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan, R-Wis., is testing support for his idea to replace Medicare with a fixed payment to buy a private medical plan from a menu of coverage options.

By Rose Ann DeMoro, Executive Director of National Nurses United –

People power works, and not just in Egypt.

Blue Shield of California today announced a 60-day reprieve for the unconscionable rate hike of up to 59 percent it intends to foist on individuals and families.

The announcement coincided with announced plans by nurses, patients, and consumer advocates who stormed Blue Shield’s posh California corporate headquarters in downtown San Francisco.

Coincidence? That’s what Blue Shield insisted, even though they scurried to get out their press release the same morning they were surrounding their doors with barricades, chains, and security guards to protect their property from families facing bankruptcy with outrageous rate hikes and nurses who care for the collateral damage from insurance abuses.

No, it wasn’t hard to connect the dots here between nurses and patients turning up the heat on Blue Shield’s barricaded doorstep the same day it agreed to an all too brief reprieve in its egregious rate increase.

But Blue Shield’s announcement won’t stop protests against Blue Shield or other insurance corporations.

We can learn a lesson from the streets of Egypt and other Arab countries.

Public pressure is essential to confront tyranny, whether you are faced with political repression or corporate control of our health.

There are lives in the balance. We can’t count on legislators, regulators, courts or the lobbyists. We have to rely on the mobilization of people to stop these insurance abuses and step up the call for genuine reform, expanding Medicare to cover everyone.

Our 200 protesters cited Blue Shield’s plan to jack up premiums, and new data documenting that California insurers deny more than one-fourth of all claims. We also heard from patients who told of the devastating effect of Blue Shield’s actions.

As California Nurses Association/National Nurses United Co-President told the rally, “We are here because this is the scene of corporate crime. The bean counters upstairs don’t sit at the bedside and hold the hands of our patients.”

“A 60-day delay is a small victory, but it won’t alleviate the pain experienced by patients every day who must endure callous price increases and care denials by an industry that cares more about its bottom line than the patients it purports to serve,” said McEwen.

Here’s what two of the patients noted:

“Our insurance is completely not worth the price. We pay almost half what we pay for rent.” said Kerry Abukhalaf who brought her son to the rally. “Its just a big rip-off. We may just throw our chances to the wind and find insurance for our son and pay out of pocket for my husband and myself.”

“I’m angry. I find it really unfair that I’m forced to pay an unlimited amount to a private company. Basically, you have to pay the insurance or go away and die. Something has to change,” said Patrick Killelea, contract programmer living in Menlo Park whose rates have increased 73% in past year.
People always ask me, ‘Why are the nurses doing this?’ My response? The nurses are doing this because they are at ground zero. They see the fall out.

One example is the almost surreal rate of claims that the big insurers reject. We presented new data, which the insurers themselves report to the state Department of Managed Care, documenting that insurers denied 26 percent of all claims last year. Since 2002, these seven firms, which account for more than three-fourths of all insurance enrollees in California, have rejected 67.5 million claims.

Others joining the protest were representatives of Consumer Watchdog, the Courage Campaign, Healthcare Now, Physicians for a National Health Program, and the San Francisco Labor Council, along with other seniors, community, and healthcare activists.

Ah, we must be more civil. No more taunts. No more tirades. No more gun crosshair targets, no matter how innocently placed on our graphics (though I am not sure gun crosshairs are ever really innocent in placement). We’ll be more civil in our discourse. In light of the tragedy in Tucson. Maybe.

But stand at the front desks in a hospital admissions area or a doctor’s office or at other providers’ offices and civility is the last thing we’ll know. We can be sick – shaking with fever, bending over in pain, bandaged for wounds, chest aching with unknown agony, and the questions and responses will be anything but civil. “What insurance do you have? Where’s your co-payment today? Is that a check, debit or credit card? Do you have a picture ID? Have you signed our legal forms and signed our privacy forms?”

And if you make it through all of that, you may still not receive the kind of care needed to make you feel better or even save your life. You may sit waiting for a doctor who may or may not treat you based on what an external organization or agency says you are entitled to receive. The doctor may be annoyed that you are in his or her care instead of farmed out to another specialist. If you do find yourself referred for a test or another doctors’ visit, you’ll start the process all over again from the beginning. Co-pay paid? Insurance in order? Credit or debit card? Picture ID?

Civility? Hell. No one has even helped with the symptoms that brought you or a loved one in for care.

In my more civil healthcare world, the first questions asked would relate to, well, civil sorts of patient-related questions. “How can I help you today? How are you feeling? Does that hurt? How can I make you more comfortable?” But until we transform this system, those questions are secondary, at best.

Even in our most crass and impersonal financial transactions, some polite interaction is programmed into the dialogue. But not in healthcare in America. It seems every time I seek care or take someone I love for care, I am treated like an annoyance or like the enemy – someone from whom the providers must be protected. The evil, non-cash-bearing patients, we are viewed by many as such.

So long as the motivation for profits and more profits and ever-increasing profits remain the primary motivator for those who dole out our care and our access to that care, I am not likely to see more civility but less. I half expect that within a short bit of time, I will carry with me a card that shows not only my medical history but also my credit score, my bank balance, my credit or debit card information, my next payday linked to a payday loan operation, my current insurance coverage and the status of my deductibles and out-of-pockets yet owing at the time of treatment and so on. It may even have my photo and maybe some biological security device to make sure I am the widget labeled on the card. If at any point in the process, I cannot pass from patient to insured patient to out-of-pocket expense paying patient to finally in the exam room patient, I’ll be let go. And it won’t be civil. All but the most exaggerated gaping and bleeding and gasping will wait until all financial systems are clear.

If we were civil in our healthcare delivery, we’d want what is the right and the best treatment for one another delivered at the most appropriate time in an appropriate way. We finance such a system through shared risk and shared cost-saving, and we’d minimize the wasted administrative expenses and the duplication of services now so costly and so un-civil.

I watch with hope when I see communities rally after tragedy. So why is our healthcare system so different then and why are our sick folks less deserving of our best caring and effort simply because their tragedies unfold more slowly, more methodically, and more quietly?

Bending the healthcare cost curve will only happen when we believe that creating a progressively financed, single-standard of high quality care for all is the most rational, civil course of action and we set about to make it happen. So far, allowing tens of thousands of our fellow citizens to suffer and die in a very uncivilized way while the care they needed was within our grasp has not compelled us to act decisively. Civility has not been the hallmark of healthcare in America.

We’ll watch next week as legislators argue the pros and cons of repealing the newest healthcare bill. They might even attempt to show a calmer tone while doing so. But whether they succeed in the political theatrics of the repeal effort or not, sick and hurting patients will keep standing at those front desks waiting to be cleared for care or sent away in shame. And no one will care much at all right now about the civility of that preventable suffering.

When we see good people harmed in unimaginable acts of violent outrage, I hope we’ll pause to remember those among us for whom quiet acts of unthinkable pain and illness are an on-going assault on any sense of human decency. When we finally have reached the point of shared realization that we’re responsible for one another and for our civil society as manifested not only in acts of occasional violence but also in our everyday ability to uplift one another for the common good, then we’ll be moving toward a sense of civility that will do more than change our words – it will change our lives.

Donna Smith is a community organizer for National Nurses United (the new national arm of the California Nurses Association) and National Co-Chair for the Progressive Democrats of America Healthcare Not Warfare campaign.

If the Obama healthcare bill is just a “government takeover,” why are healthcare industry CEOs being rewarded with so much money?

The alleged expropriation of healthcare by big government is, of course, a major story line of the right and the new leadership of the House which is planning the useless exercise of a vote to repeal the law.

But if the private companies who actually do control our health are hurting so badly, why are they shelling out so much to their top executives?

A report from Kaiser Health News exposes lavish pay packages for some of the biggest players in the private healthcare industry. Billy Tauzin, the head of PhRMA, raked in more than $9 million last year, for example, while his counterpart Scott Serota at Blue Cross/Blue Shield earned a comparitively-miserly $7.1 million.

Other major corporate healthcare figures receiving huge executive pay packages were from the hospital, medical technology, and biotech industry.

As KHN notes, most of these execs supported either the entire law or key aspects of the law. It is a fiction to assert that healthcare corporations have in any way been harmed by this reform, or will be harmed. Their pay practices to top executives make that very clear.

Drug companies won a victory by blocking re-importation of prescription drugs. Insurance companies won a victory, for the time being at least, with millions of forced new customers from the mandate. Hospital revenues are expected to spike, medical technology companies will see a surge in sales, and biotech firms won a dubious 12-year exclusivity for brand name biologic drugs.

Given that, do we really need to replay the same debate over the current law over and over? Will that solve any of the still very real problems that exist? Those notably include the tens of millions of Americans who remain uninsured, many of whom will not be covered even if the law goes into full effect, and the millions more who are slammed daily by un-payable medical bills and ever rising costs that the bill does so little to address.

Reminders of the continuing healthcare crisis come regularly. To name just three:

1. The U.S. ranks just 22nd in health well-being among major industrialized countries, according to a UNICEF report issued in December.

2. Growing numbers of parents with premature babies, or children born with special needs, according to another KNH report, are being socked with huge bills for neonatal care because the health professionals are deemed to be “out of network.”

3. Only 58 percent of private sector employees have access to paid sick leave, according to a report out this week from the Institute for Women’s Policy Research. Among the consequences, many sick employees come to work because they can’t afford the unpaid lost time, especially in a deep recession, at risk of aggravating their illness and facing more serious sickness, more lost time, and higher health costs, and the likelihood of infecting others in their workplace.

It’s time to move on. Let’s end the fiction that the current law was a government takeover. Let’s stop replaying the fruitless debate of the past two years over the false issues the right loves to exploit.

And let’s find ways to address the continuing health problems plaguing so many by working instead:

To really reign in skyrocketing costs, that are primarily driven by the very same profiteering private companies whose executives are being paid so much, and guarantee healthcare for all Americans, best done by expanding the most cost effective, real universal program — it’s called Medicare — to cover everyone.

Deborah Burger, RN, is co-president of National Nurses United, the nation’s largest and fastest-growing union and professional association of RNs, with 160,000 members around the country.

RENO, Nevada — I ventured backward in my memories to the fall of 2006 and wondered what might have happened differently if the Tea Party ruled this nation. It’s not that I am thrilled with the current state of political reality, but I am worried that if the trend toward more greed, more self-righteousness and more far flung and far-fetched ultra-conservatism continues, folks like me will stand no chance. We’ll be washed away like street dust down the storm drains after a fast-moving, summer thunderstorm, and no one will think of us again.

We are — I am — among the unclean. I tried in vain to keep my financial head above water in the face of impending healthcare doom and financial collapse. I failed to negotiate manageable payments with doctors and hospitals and clinics and even a local pharmacy. I did always pay my health insurance premiums, though. I succeeded at least in that way. But belly up I went. That was 2006.

It has been nearly four years since our journey to reclaim our dignity began. Bankrupt and homeless, sick and tired, we decided allowing our healthcare horror story to be told by Michael Moore would at least document our demise somehow.

If the Tea Party had been in control, perhaps the collapse might have been mercifully more brief. Under their view of the healthcare world, people without the appropriate and adequate means of payment should perish due to the lack of those means. Let’s see. That means when I was diagnosed with cancer, I might have found out immediately that since I did not have my full deductible payment up front that I would have to wait for treatment until I did. The reality was that my symptoms — in my case severe bleeding — would have prevented me from working every day I needed to in order to take home a full paycheck and save $10 or $20 a pay period toward that $2,000 deductible. If I had survived the bleeding, the cancer would have advanced. Under the Tea Party view, that would apparently have been just and maybe God’s will for my life outcome.

And what about my husband? We often struggled to meet his health costs — that is until he was eligible for Medicare coverage and the supplemental coverage we purchased. Again, if the Tea Party had been in control, we would have had no way to apply for Social Security disability and finally Medicare, and my husband would not have survived to retirement age. Damaged goods, I suppose, in the Tea Party view.

Again, I am not saying our outcomes were better because of the Democrats or the moderate Republicans or the Independents, the Greens, or any other political party in America. My husband and I survived because of a Michael Moore film and a series of somewhat lesser miracles stemming from our experiences being included in SiCKO — and because we have sacrificed all other goals in our lives to clawing our way out of that storm gutter. No one is cutting us slack.

It took not just one miracle but several to lift us from our healthcare-financial collapse even without the Tea Party in power. It shouldn’t take that, but it did and still does. The work we both have to do and the time we must spend apart is extraordinarily difficult. But if we flinch now, we’ll be washed right back down that drain of failure as if the past 48 months of intense effort never happened. That’s what hard-working Americans face every day. Most don’t have the miracles we had to build on.

Tea Party faithful believe that not only will the weak not inherit the earth but that the weak shall be banished from it. Tea Party faithful think people are weak who must lean on our social safety nets, even if many of them collect Social Security, unemployment benefits and are Medicare beneficiaries. No matter, they think and they proselytize. Do away with all those “wicked” entitlements, they muse.

So, in my backwards time capsule, I bleed my way through a few months or even a year working with cancer and trying to save cash to meet my deductible. During that year, my husband’s artery disease advances due to the lack of a single-standard of high quality care for all and due to the stress of watching me suffer. In the end, after months of painful decline and loss of my job and our only income, we end up dead. We leave bills behind we could not pay and boxes of our personal belongings with no saleable value that will need to be taken to the dumpster.

Think of all the taxes I wouldn’t have paid and the money I wouldn’t have spent in just four years if I had died back then. Some of the people who have benefited from my staying alive would have also had less happy outcomes.

It would have been ugly but swift. In a Tea Party world, the meek and the weak are so because they didn’t work hard enough or long enough. If their vision prevails, which I hear as only a slight morph of the right-wing Republican agenda, there will be a culling out of those who get sick or hurt and don’t have a way to bankroll their recoveries.

But, wait, back to my reality. The Tea Party vision really isn’t very much different from how it is right now. The stark truth of it is that if the same thing were to happen to me today that unfolded pre-SiCKO, there would be no Michael Moore’s SiCKO II and no rescue and no way to recreate the miracles of 2006-2010.

Until we all embrace reality that our healthcare mess — under any system that does not provide a progressively financed, single standard of high quality care for all — is an economic and also very personal expression of our national cruelty toward the weak and towards one another, we will remain Tea Party loyalists in the making. Right now, some just want to pretend they represent some other view, but as far as I can tell, death and failure are imminent for people like me; it’s just a matter of how quickly and how harshly.

So long as the Tea Party is even one step away from control, I’ll work to advance a wiser, more economically bold and sane system that views the loss of life as a cost we collectively cannot swallow.

I’ll keep on keeping on, as the saying goes. I’ll keep hoping and praying and doing the hard work to back up that hope and prayer. But if we move closer to a Tea Party view instead of away from it and if I face another situation in which a new cancer diagnosis arises again, I think I’ll just shut up and bleed.

Donna Smith is a community organizer for National Nurses United (the new national arm of the California Nurses Association), National Co-Chair for the Progressive Democrats of America Healthcare Not Warfare campaign and Healthcare-NOW! Steering Committee member.

The registered nurses of the North Adams Regional Hospital (NARH) voted overwhelmingly July 19 to authorize their union leadership to call a strike if necessary in their ongoing negotiations with hospital management. In a unified show of strength, 99% of the voting members voted in favor of the strike authorization.

“With this vote, the nurses at this hospital have sent a clear message. We are ready and willing to strike in the defense of our patients, our profession and the future of quality health care at NARH,” said Ruth O’Hearn, RN, a nurse in the ICU and co-chairperson of the Massachusetts Nurses Association (MNA) local bargaining unit at NARH. “We entered these negotiations with the understanding that the hospital is in a difficult financial position. In that spirit we didn’t ask for a wage increase and since then have dropped any proposal that would cost the hospital money. They have responded to this olive branch with a hammer. The hospital has refused to remove any of their proposals that would radically gut our contract, allow them to undermine our nursing practice and totally control our lives.”

“The hospital’s proposals would have a disastrous effect on the quality of patient care. Under their plan NARH once again would be allowed to use mandatory OT to staff the hospital, and patient care would suffer. NARH also wants to eliminate contract language that allows a nurse to decline overtime if she is exhausted or sick. As experienced professional caregivers we know when we are unable to care for our patients, but the managers seem to think they know more than we do,” said Mary McConnell, RN and a nurse in the PACU and Co-Chair of the bargaining unit.

“We are first and foremost advocates for our patients and management is seeking to take that away. They want a gag order that would stifle any negative comments, as defined by management. This would mean a nurse wouldn’t be able to even write a letter to the editor without fear of losing her/his job. For patients, this means nurses will be prohibited from speaking out about patient care, working conditions and unsafe staffing,” said O’Hearn.

Management also wants to ignore the posted work schedules, to be able to cancel shifts, to mandate extra shifts at their whim, to change the hours of a shift, and to mandate staff to come in early or stay late. This will leave the nurses unable to plan their lives and child care because they essentially would be on call 24/7.

The negotiations started in January. Management put over one hundred proposals on the table, many of them concessions that would serve to make the present contract meaningless. The MNA has represented the 106 nurse-bargaining unit for over thirty years and bargained numerous contracts over those years but never faced these types of proposals. The hospital has hired a noted “union avoidance” law firm, spending thousands of dollars in legal fees that could have been spent to maintain the quality of patient care.

“We don’t want to strike, but they are leaving us no choice if they continue to insist on their abusive and unreasonable demands,” said O’Hearn. “It is our hope that they will come to their senses and finally treat this community and their employees with the dignity and respect we deserve.”

Founded in 1903, the Massachusetts Nurses Association (MNA) is the largest professional health care organization and the largest union of registered nurses in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. Its 23,000 members advance the nursing profession by fostering high standards of nursing practice, promoting the economic and general welfare of nurses in the workplace, projecting a positive and realistic view of nursing, and by lobbying the Legislature and regulatory agencies on health care issues affecting nurses and the public.

While Frontline extensively interviewed Dr. Margaret Flowers of PNHP, they neglected to broadcast the very reason that she and others risked arrest: to get a single-payer advocate to testify in the Senate Finance Committee hearings on health care. Frontline, rather, depicted these advocates as President Obama’s “liberal base” leaving out any discussion about why nurses, doctors, and every-day Americans would risk being arrested by Federal police.

You can act now and write to the ombud at PBS to protest this exclusion of the single-payer viewpoint. It is wrong for Congress and the media to exclude the most evidence-based solution to our health crisis.

The exclusion of single-payer showed that right from the outset Obama had made a deal with the health insurance, drug, and hospital industries.

We expect better from PBS and Frontline. Contact the ombud today!

For some ideas for your comments to PBS, see Kevin Zeese’s (Exec. Dir. of Prosperity Agenda) response.