Amidst the talk of the 2008 Senate races, Senator Barbara Boxer may be the most endangered incumbent in the class of 2010.

Polling came out this week finding that she narrowly trails Arnold Schwarzenegger in a projected matchup.

And now the health insurance industry has come up with a devilish scheme to prop up Arnold, increase their revenues by hundreds of millions of dollars, end the drive for genuine healthcare reform all in one fell swoop…with Boxer’s Senate seat being collateral damage in this scenario.

We’ll take a look below…cross-posted at daily kos, hence more background than Caliticsians might need!

It all hinges on the drive for health care reform in California.  There’s a fake debate going on right now, with insurers funding both sides.  Governor Arnold’s proposal is to require individuals to purchase expensive, wasteful, private insurance products.  Some Democrats in the legislature are countering with a proposal to force employers to purchase these same products.

Really, what’s not for insurers to like?

And now we are presented with a strange political kabuki between these two proposals.  Advocates on both sides are bashing the other-with arguments that would apply exactly equally to their own proposal.

So yesterday, in a bit of Capitol irony, Schwarzenegger’s health care plan was heard on Halloween-and it is scary and full of treats for insurance donors.  The charge that the legislators made against his plan?  It’s unaffordable!  But their counter-plan, for so-called employer mandates, is just as bad.  That’s the system we have now, but more.  And it’s a recipe out-of-control premiums, rising co-pays and deductibles, and an entire industry devoted to denial of care.  In short, we’d have the healthcare crisis we already do. 

We don’t know the third act of this drama.  But since the sides aren’t really too far apart, there’s a good chance that Schwarzenegger will compromise, look like a conquering hero, bring fake healthcare reform to California, and be all set up to turn the wonderful Barbara Boxer out of the Senate in 2010, with full complicity of a number of legislators who are heavy on the payroll of the big insurance corporations. 

George Skelton, dean of the California press, doesn’t think so, but neither he nor I are privy to the planning sessions that the insurers have convened between Arnold and their Democratic allies. 

The sad part is that after the legislature passed a guaranteed healthcare, single-payer bill last year, Arnold set the terms of this year’s debate by vetoing it.  Now the Capitol insiders are running around saying, “let’s get something, anything done so we look good.”  Malinda Markowitz, RN, a member of CNA/NNOC’s Council of Presidents, takes on this argument, saying:

Sadly, the main beneficiaries of a rushed “compromise” will be the same insurance companies that created the present crisis. They would harvest millions of new customers, with the government using its power and the public purse to further an insurance industry that will continue to be able to profiteer and deny care.
We don’t have to turn just to Massachusetts to see an example of how this can lead to disastrous public policy. A decade ago, the same “consensus” pushed the hurried passage of energy deregulation. That was followed by blackouts, skyrocketing energy costs for consumers, financial calamity for the state, and open thievery by Enron and other energy corporations.
Californians should demand that legislators pull the plug before we plunge into another disaster.

And in case we needed it, here’s one more reason to fight for genuine healthcare reform on the single-payer model: nearly two million veterans, who already face a number of challenges, have no coverage at all.  That’s just not right.

Trick or trick?

It’s not just that Rudy Ghouliani lied about the odds of patients in Britain surviving the kind of prostate cancer he had, in the controversial radio ad and message of the day he’s offering this Halloween.

It’s not just that Rudy asserts the big lie, that “we have the best healthcare system in the world,” better than the “socialized medicine” practiced by scary countries like Canada, Taiwan, France, England, etc.  Or even that he is willing to pimp out his own cancer diagnosis, while dismissing the healthcare inequality that shames our nation.

We’ll look at what’s really scary after the fold…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.

What Rudy’s Halloween health care moment highlights is just how scared American patients should be of any of the Republican candidates, and their “it’s your problem” approach to healthcare.  The lot of them are against universal healthcare-let alone guaranteed healthcare. 

We’d be back to square one: the debate would not be over how to guarantee every American can access the health care they need-but whether poor people really need or deserve healthcare.  The debate would no longer be over whether to replace or regulate insurance companies-but instead how to ensure their ongoing profitability.  The debate wouldn’t be about we-it would just be about he.  We wouldn’t be on a path to guaranteed, single-payer care–we’d see be on a fast track to more pain, suffering, and heartache.

What may be even scarier than Rudy this Halloween?  The trend towards health care credit cards.  Already half of all bankruptcies are medical-related…now you can get all that and 19 per cent interest, also!

The good news is that the activist docs at Physicians for a National Health Program continue their sharp advocacy…and nurses striking in Appalachia over patient care issues are still on the picket line.  Go nurses!

The movement for guaranteed healthcare remains centered this week in California, as plans based on huge public subsidies for insurance corporations wend their way through a special session of the legislature.  The good news?  In-fighting has broken out between Governor Schwarzenegger and some of the Dems in the legislature, making it harder for them to reach the anti-patient compromise they’re shooting for.  RNs and patient advocates, among other groups, continue to monitor the situation and work to ensure that any bills hurting patients are defeated. 

Nationally, the Kaiser Daily Health Policy Report looks at the health care angles of the latest Republican Presidential debate.  Seems like they’re more interested in attacking Hillary Clinton than the healthcare crisis.

Clarence Page notes the central confusion over the SCHIP veto:

…the public has been very supportive of Medicare for the elderly, Medicaid for the poor and the State Children’s Health Insurance Program, or SCHIP, for children whose family income is too high for Medicaid but too low to afford private coverage. Nevertheless, the president and his allies are reduced to reminding people that, “Pssst, it’s government health care so you’re supposed to be afraid of it.”

Hopefully, George Bush is right and S-CHIP is the first step towards guaranteeing all people, child or adult, have access to healthcare.

Right now, that’s only true in San Francisco.

Finally, as health insurance takes a bite out of wages, labor unions getting more involved in healthcare issues, and nurses in the Appalachian region Appalachian RNs are striking.  Go, nurses!

…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.

Great news for the single-payer movement: a majority of state federations of labor have now endorsed guaranteed, single-payer healthcare!  (Well, ok, 25 out of 50, but one of them is MD-DC.)  This follows on the heels of the recent announcement by the national AFL-CIO that they are pushing Medicare for All.  Do not discount how important this is…guaranteed, single-payer healthcare now becomes the only proposal with an organized, powerful constituency pushing for it. 

More labor endorsements are coming every day…Here’s what Oregon has to say:

The resolution continues, “. . . (T)he fundamental principal of the labor movement — that fragmentation leads to weakness while solidarity leads to strength — is a powerful tool that can be applied to create a consolidated, single payer American healthcare system.”

The Rockridge Institute and George Lakoff are also advocating for single-payer healthcare.  They’ve written a very interesting study on the “neo-liberal” biases inherent in how we talk about the debate.  Long story short: the conservatives don’t want you to think of a sick child, they want you to think about the problems with regulating industries like insurance.  Check out their new video…

Don’t forget, Al Gore’s also fighting for single-payer healthcare, and the National Nurses Organizing Committee/California Nurses Association are thanking him for it.

Elsewhere, it seems the public is quite ready to pay for SCHIP.

In case you missed it…HMOs in California?  Not doing such a great job.  But nurses could have told you that.

Finally, when conservatives attack single-payer healthcare, here’s the best they can come up with:

A shift to a single-payer system for all Americans would yield net savings in reported administrative costs of about $100 billion annually, or $2,100 in additional health care benefits for each of the 47 million individuals estimated as uninsured.

Everything else in the article is a bunch of lies written by corporate PR people, so be warned.

…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.

So after being peppered with criticism from both term limits groups and the California Nurses Association, the Speaker’s office has chosen which group to strike back at: the nurses, of course, using the exact same standard of judgment that they called a “smear job” when it was used against Nuñez.

This is an argument over improving the delivery and cost of health care, and there’s plenty of ideological rigidity to go around.  What started as a promising “year of health care reform” has devolved into putative allies arguing about how much money the other spends on hotel rooms.  Behind the mere gaining of political points is a serious debate about how to best allow all California citizens, not just the ones with full-time employment (us freelancers need health care too), the highest quality affordable health care they can manage.  And the real truth of the matter, the one that nobody really wants to talk about, is that none of these state-based plans, by definition, have any hope of working and have serious potential consequences, besides.  I think that’s why everyone’s getting so mad at one another, because it’s easier to do so than to face the facts.

We’ve got all these great universal bills passing at the state level, and I’m here to tell you that, well, they are pretty great, but they’re not going to work. It didn’t work in Washington State, when they tried it, and the insurers first jacked up the premiums, and then moved out of the state in order to kill the model. It didn’t work in Hawaii, which saw an economic downturn move more people onto their subsidies exactly as the state’s revenues dropped. It didn’t work in Tennessee, where the Democratic governor, Phil Bredesen, upon killing off Tenncare and leaving 300,000 people uninsured, told his state that, “I say to you with a clear heart that I’ve tried everything. There is no big lump of federal money that will make the problem go away.” Similar plans failed in Oregon, in Massachusetts, and many other states.

The plans fall for a few small reasons, and one big one. The big one is that states don’t have the fiscal stability to run universal health care. 49 of 50 states cant deficit spend. That means that when the state goes into recession and more people need subsidies and the revenues to give them don’t exist the state can’t borrow the money. So they dismantle the program. It’s happened time and time again — in some states, like Oregon, more than once.

Moreover, you don’t really want this being a state-run solution. As a stopgap, increasing coverage through state plans is worthwhile, but health care reform is more than access – it’s actual reform to bring down costs, which are, at the end of the day, the biggest problem in the system. And the states don’t have the regulatory authority, the money, or, save in a few cases, the size to do that. I simply don’t trust them to fundamentally reform the system.

California is obviously one state that has the size, and certainly could float ever more bonds to spend the necessary money.  But we’re almost certainly on the cusp of a new recession, and the combination of massive debt passed on to grandkids and a pay-to-play system that still reigns supreme in Sacramento is unpalatable to reform.

I repsect the efforts of groups like Physicians for a Naitonal Health Plan, who have studied the issue and recommended some of the best possible solutions.  But that word “national” is hard to get around; it’s the only way to create the real economies of scale and managed risk necessary for a solution.  I believe in health care for everyone, not simply in red states or blue states.  As Ezra Klein notes,

You know, whenever you talk about the state reforms, you always hear the old Brandeis quote about the “laboratories of democracy.” But there’s another Brandeis saying that I think is more applicable: “If we would guide by the light of reason,” he said, “we must let our minds be bold.” And that’s what I’m asking: Be bold. Because nothing else will, in the long term, work.

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!

Why do you love CNA?

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.