Guaranteed Healthcare

'Tis the season!  And President Bush delivered the equivalent of a lump of coal to the nation's children.  You're a mean one, Mr. Grinch.  In vetoing the SCHIP legislation (for the second time in as many months), Bush stated, " it moves our country's health care system in the wrong direction."  Perhaps the problem is with the President's moral compass...

Today we learned that the same president who is willing to throw away a half trillion dollars in Iraq is unwilling to spend a small fraction of that amount to bring health care to American children. Bush stated that,  "our nation's goal should be to move children who have no health insurance to private coverage -- not to move children who already have private health insurance to government coverage." http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2007/12/12/politics/politico/thecrypt/main3612870.shtm

President Bush is wrong about SCHIP.  It replaces private insurers--the very middleman bureaucracy that consumes 31% of health care dollars--without ever laying hands on the patients, according to a 2003 study http://www.pnhp.org/publications/nejmadmin.pdf published in the New England Journal of Medicine.

I believe that this is a basic question of right and wrong. It is simply wrong to deny any children in this country access to health care because their parents lack insurance or have a low income. The majority of the American people recognize that. President Bush has no justification to veto SCHIP by claiming that it would mark a step toward government-run health care.

We need a single payer health care plan for everyone, like Medicare, and take the insurance middlemen out of the loop.  No other industrialized nation sacrifices it's children's health on the alter of profit.  Who are we as a nation, and what have we become?" to quote SiCKO director Michael Moore.

Lillian Wald, the founder of public health nursing in this country once observed, "That moral deterioration falls upon people who deliberately wrong others, is equally true of a nation.... Without claiming the gift of prophecy, one can foresee that our sins, political and social, must recoil upon the heads of our descendants. We commit ourselves to any wrong or degradation or injury when we do not protest against it."

As nurses and members of the National Nurses Organizing Committee we do not intend to let this generation pass without fighting for health care equality and justice.  Single payer, guaranteed healthcare for all: a national health plan, HR 676.