More than SCHIP, the important action in the movement for guaranteed healthcare is happening in California, where the insurance industry almost pulled off the big scam, getting Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger and Speaker Fabian Nunez to cooperate on a plan forcing the sale of more expensive, unworkable insurance products-and blocking the guaranteed, single-payer reform this country needs.

Good news!  The Schwarzenegger-Nunez scam is dead!  This is a major victory for progressives, patients, and nurses.  The Dems have figured out how bad a deal Schwarzenegger is offering, and the plan’s main cheerleader Nunez is near-dead politically by revelations that his wife is now on the hospital industry payroll to the tune of six figures, and that he is struggling with a nasty case of luxury shopaholism with donor money.

…cross-posted at the National Nurses Organizing Committee/California Nurses Association’s Breakroom Blog, as we organize to make 2007 the Year of GUARANTEED healthcare on the single-payer model.

The quick background for those of you who missed it…insurance corporations have set the terms of the debate this year in California, with Schwarzenegger proposing that all individuals be forced to purchase private insurance products, and Nunez and certain corporate Dems countering that all employers be forced to purchase them on behalf of their workforce.  Both plans would give more customers, revenue, and medical influence to the very insurance corporations who have ruined our healthcare system…while doing nothing to actually solve our healthcare crisis.

Everything has changed as a broad coalition of mainstream Dems has realized that Arnold’s plan is unaffordable for the average patient.  Of course it is!  Private insurers waste one-third of care dollars on overhead and profits.  You simply cannot do that and provide people with the care they need.  Of course, any plan built on private insurance corporations is unworkable.

What’s politically significant is that these Dems seem to be making it impossible for the grand Schwarzenegger-Nunez deal to be cut.  Personal attacks on the Governor are not the road to compromise.  Even USA Today noted the failure of the industry plan.

The Dems have hired attack dog Chris Lehane to help beat up the Governor, and he says, “the only way you get a health care plan done in this country is making it more affordable, not less – and this plan doesn’t do that.”

Meanwhile, Barbara O’Connor, a noted political commentator, added “clearly the goal is to define the governor as soft on industry, and it’s not going to resolve the conflict – and so health care will not get out.”

But what really kills the deal is the fact that Speaker Nunez’ wife has just gone on the payroll of the hospital industry, having been hired by a lobbying group funded by the California Hospital Association.  It is quite possible that he will be legally required to recuse himself on all healthcare bills…including the one he is trying to push through with Schwarzenegger.  Even if not, the symbolism of doubling his family income through HMO money leaves him with no credibility on the issue.

Or as Zenei Cortez, RN, put it: “Californians can no longer trust that he will represent the public interest and not the financial interest of a large industry that has put his wife on their payroll.”

Of course you gotta feel for the Nunez family…it’s not easy to fund global luxury travel anymore!

To join the fight for guaranteed healthcare (with a “Medicare for All” or SinglePayer financing), visit GuaranteedHealthcare.org, a project of the National Nurses Organizing Committee/California Nurses Association.

Like a slow-motion earthquake the healthcare mess continues to roil the Golden State.  Just this week, California Governor pitches the lottery as his secret weapon for solving the healthcare crisis, Speaker Nunez makes clear why he has to keep taking so much money from health insurance corporations, and mega-chain Sutter Healthcare faces the largest nurses strike in a decade.

…cross-posted at the National Nurses Organizing Committee/California Nurses Association’s Breakroom Blog, as we organize to make 2007 the Year of GUARANTEED healthcare on the single-payer model.

A picture beats a thousands words, so just go look at this striking nurse.  Sutter was humiliated this week when 5,000 nurses walked off the job in a revolt against patterns of unsafe care by the chain, which pulled in $587 million in profits just last year.  RNs like Millicent Borland walked out because they are obligated to stand up for their patients. 

Heck-go check out all the pictures of the nurses.  At a dozen facilities, thousands of nurses partied, chanted, fought, and helped give new momentum to the labor movement and the healthcare movement in this incredibly important showdown.  If California nurses can clean up chains out here, patients across the country will get better care as a result.

Sutter responded today by locking out thousands of nurses trying to return to work after the strike.  Unfortunately for Sutter, the more they disrespect, disparage, and attack their nurses-the more momentum Millicent and her RN colleagues will have in their patient and social activism.

Meanwhile, tough times for Sutter’s ally Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger.  He finally coughed up a plan to fund his plan to force Californians to purchase private and unreliable health insurance products.  Arnold’s brainstorm: a lottery!  On the one hand it makes sense, because he’s gambling with patient health.  On the other hand, what he’s really doing is cutting education funds to subsidize his corporate insurance donors, and that’s just not right.

Arnold is negotiating with his ally, Speaker Fabian Nunez, to come up with a plan that will be acceptable to both the Republican and Democratic wings of the insurance lobby.  And nowwe know why Speaker Nunez is so desperate to stay in the good graces of his insurance industry donors…he’s a shopaholic:

of Núñez’s expenses – covered by campaign funds – include $8,745 at the Hotel Arts in Barcelona, Spain; $5,149 for a meeting at a wine seller in France’s Bordeaux region; and $2,562 for office expenses at Louis Vuitton, a Parisian store that specializes in leather goods, clothing, fashion accessories and jewelry, the Los Angeles Times reported.

Sounds like we need him outta the mall and off the insurance industry payroll.

Finally…A new story finds that even kids with private insurance aren’t getting the care they need.  The tribulations of the Frost family make clear why we need guaranteed healthcare on the single-payer model, although unfortunately the leading Democratic presidential candidates all seem to have given up hope for that.  Maybe they should take a look at Taiwan, which has given itself a tremendous economic boost by moving to a single-payer system…based on U.S. Medicare!

Thousands of RNs represented by the California Nurses Association will walk off the job October 10 through 12 in a strike against the mammoth Sutter Healthcare Corporation.  This is the largest strike by nurses in this country for at least a decade and the stakes are high.

This Sutter strike affects 5,500 nurses at 16 different facilities.  But it also affects each and every one of us.  Nurses are walking the picket line for the dream of better health care in this country.  Don’t take it from me-listen to the striking nurses in their own words in this video.

You know how you read stories about people victimized by the healthcare industry-[ http://juliepierce-s… say Julie Pierce]-and your eyes tear up and your heart gets heavy?  Registered nurses are on the front line of this crisis every single day and live these stories every day…watching innocent people die because their insurance claim was denied, because they couldn’t afford insurance mark-ups, because they didn’t get preventative medicine.

Sutter Healthcare is the “poster child” for cruel hospital chains.  They have figured out the scam…maximize hospital profits by slashing patient care to the bone.  Sutter takes literally hundreds of millions of dollars of profits out of the healthcare system each year.  Sutter shut down community hospitals that don’t achieve their profit margin-i.e., those serving sub-premium patients, who are sometimes known as poor people.

One of Sutter’s favorite ways to deny care for profit is by routine understaffing of their nurses.  Study after study has shown that nurse staffing is directly tied to patient mortality…if you leave patients alone in a bed, bad things happen to them.  If you make sure patients have access to nursing care, good things happen to them.

Unfortunately, at Sutter, patients are ringing their call button and there is just no nurse on shift to care for them.

That’s deadly for the patients-and heartbreaking for the nurses.  Jan Rodolfo, a pediatric oncology RN at Summit Hospital in Oakland, put it this way: “We are deeply concerned about the quality of care and the availability of patient services in communities that have long supported Sutter hospitals.  Inadequate staffing is a persistent problem at Sutter facilities. No one understands what staffing we need to provide safe patient care better than bedside nurses.”

Other hospital chains are not abusive this way.  Other hospital chains listen to their nurses and write patient safety into the contract.  But not Sutter, and 6,000 nurses have had enough and won’t take it anymore. 

You can help.  Call Sutter’s CEO Pat Fry and tell him you support the nurses-and safe care for all their patients: 916-286-6752.

And just in case you think that a major nurses strike will slow down our national advocacy on behalf of single-payer healthcare….Don’t worry.

…cross-posted at the National Nurses Organizing Committee/California Nurses Association’s Breakroom Blog, as we organize to make 2007 the Year of GUARANTEED healthcare on the single-payer model.