Guaranteed Healthcare

Politicians and pundits forget that we still have a public health infrastructure that still fights to prevent preventable diseases like polio, measles, tuberculosis, HIV, std's and would be called upon in a city-wide disaster to provide care and comfort to traumatized citizens left high and dry by natural events.

We are still the safety net for now 48 million Americans without health insurance and even those with insurance  who cannot afford to pay the rising costs of their own care. We are the "white line" against disaster, communicable diseases and those with no real access to care.  But, because of cuts, especially here in California by Arnold Schwarzenegger, medicare and other state programs which for the Govenator has become the only way to ease our budget woes , this thin white line in the sand,  faces more strains than ever before.  We need to get serious about single-payer sooner rather than later.  The public's health is at risk without it.

The U.S. Conference of Mayors has just endorsed HR 676, "Medicare For All" as the best antidote to the  health care crisis facing U.S. cities across the country. At their annual meeting, 8 mayors,  started the ball rolling toward a full endorsement and have now joined San Francisco Mayor, Gavin Newsom, with their support for truly universal health care.  From New York, Florida to California, the growing list of cities with the problems of the un-insured and under-insured,  is placing a heavy burden on their public health hospitals and clinics.  HR 676 is the answer to keeping our public health system alive and well. 

I'll never forget the story of Nataline Sarkisyan, a young 17 year-old, LA youth who had a real chance at surviving her leukemia diagnosis.  Having started my professional nursing career on a hematology/oncology floor at UCSF, leukemia patients are the most challenging, yet rewarding patients to take care of.  One mistake, one delay, even as much as an hour, can mean the difference between life and death.  These patients and their families are true champions and heros in my book.  Nothing got me more angry than the story of this young teen and her un-necessary fight with her insurance company, CIGNA.  She and her family would eventually win their battle, but in the end it was too late.

Thank you Supervisor Tom Ammiano, CNA/NNOC endorsed candidate for State Assembly, for holding hearings to support HR 676, Medicare for All, on June 10th at 2pm.  It is time local elected's take a stand on the only real solution to financing our health care system in the nation.  Meanwhile, San Francisco's Mayor Newsom has introduced sweeping budgets cuts to Public Health including lay-offs and loss of 8 days of pay for all health workers including nurses.  Threatening, "He will remember" if we do not take the furloughing agreement, to save our services, he is also cutting funding for the homeless in the city's poorest district.

In Honor of National Nurses Week, I thought I though I would investigate what Florence Nightingale faced when she began her quest to reform the British health care and along the way,  wound up challenging the very under-pinnings of English civil society. And like another valiant reformer, Fannie Lou Hamer,  who similarly struggled to over-come deeper issues of racism and sexism for equality. Like both these women, I am sick and tired of being sick and tired over so-called "health care reform". What it needs is no less than radical surgery not bandaides through individual mandates and more of the same insurance for all. What we need is a "Medicare for All, Single-Payer system, not in the future but now.  Too many lives are at stake.

I called my Assembly Representative, Majority Whip, Fiona Ma on Friday to stop this hastily crafted deal of Govenor Schwarzenegger and Speaker Nunez for health care reform. AB X1 1, which sounds like a new kind of "rat poison" passed on Monday. To me, after  reading what limited parts of the bill are availible, this seems more like a "poison pill" disguised as a health care reform bill.  The plan or plot of this deal, between our Govenator and the Democratic Speaker  Nunez, is to send it next to the Senate and if it passes there, on to California Ballot, in November 2008. This bill is a real stinker for patients all around. The big winner here are the insurance companies who, courtesy of Speaker Nunez and our Gov, just got any early holiday gift.  The rest of us got a lump of coal.

   With the holidays in full swing, a lot of the young patients I see in San Francisco, are depressed, stressed-out and down-right sick.  Between working crappy going no where jobs that pay little,  sky-high rents, going to school full-time and trying to pay down loans and no chance of health insurance from either work, parents or school, this generation should be called "the stressed out gen". 

   Most of these patients wait until it gets so bad, either the pain or the self-treatment from multiple trips to the OTC counter at Walgreens doesn't work anymore. 

   They usually delay their medical care until it gets so bad there really isn't a choice but the public sector.