Guaranteed Healthcare

By Donna Smith, community organizer 

SAN FRANCISCO -- The nurses of the California Nurses Association and the National Nurses Organizing Committee do much more for patients than bedside care and patient advocacy.  These amazing fighters give the patients bruised and battered by this broken healthcare system a voice in the darkness. 

And today, as many patients joined the nurses' march across the Golden Gate Bridge, the honesty and courage nurses often show to their patients in their most vulnerable moments transformed into a gift of dignity and shared purpose.  Together, nurses and patients called for guaranteed, single payer healthcare for all.

Above you see Hilda Sarkisyan, mom of the late Nataline Sarkisyan -- the beautiful 17-year-old girl who died after her insurance company first denied her liver transplant and then reversed its awful decision too late to save her life.

Part of what often makes this fight for reform more challenging is that many of its victims are dead or too sick to take to the streets in protest.  So having our nurses and many of our doctors stand by our sides as we cry out for justice means everything.

Today, as we marched across the Golden Gate, we patients who were able did so on behalf of the more than 100,000 people who die every year of preventable causes -- either lack of access to medical care or inappropriate care or medical error often caused by unsafe staffing levels for nurses and other medical professionals.

We patients who are strong enough to fight do so because we cannot do otherwise.  Hilda never wants another mother to bury her child following an insurance company's denials of care.  And I cannot stand to think about other moms and wives and cancer victims fighting financial trauma as they already are battling life-threatening illness. 

 And the RNs of CNA/NNOC understand that we fight this fight -- as they do -- because we know a better and more just system is possible for all. Thank you nurses. 

Thank you for caring enough to lift us and embrace us in this cause.  And for a marvelous and historic walk, thank you.  It is a day of action that will matter when the walls come tumbling down.