Guaranteed Healthcare

Nurses from across the country, actually the world, are on a bus tour promoting "Scrubs for SiCKO" a campaign to recruit a nurse or doctor to each of the movie's 3,000 opening night screens.  These healthcare providers--many in custom red scrubs--will work to maximize the impact SiCKO has on our political and social debates about how to finally guarantee healthcare and get private insurance corporations out of our healthcare system.   Along the way, an unprecedented coalition of activists nurses, many from the California Nurses Association/National Nurses Organizing Committee, as well as a dozen other nurses groups, is coming together to demand real healthcare reform now. Below is the third report from the tour, co-written by a number of nurses as they travelled to Chicago and New Hampshire last week.  This stretch was incredibly important for we went from the belly of the beast to the belly of the beast...that is, from Chicago's national HQ for Blue Cross/Blue Shield to the epicenter of the Presidential race in Manchester.   

For more information, please visit www.GuaranteedHealthcare.org/Sicko and sign up!

Our day in Chicago showed the power of coalition.  Nurses, doctors, religious groups, community organizations--all told some 50 different groups came together to indicate the broad base of Americans demanding real healthcare reform now.  Moore received a rock star welcome from the crowd of 500+ after he was introduced by legendary historian Studs Terkel. 

Blue Cross/Blue Shield heard we were coming so they took their street-level sign from in front of their building.  We were flattered, but that didn't stop the crowd from a spirited protest their anyway, covered by a half-dozen TV cameras, and joined by workers from inside the building as well as many Chicago rush-hour commuters.  The crowd marched to cheers through downtown Chicago to a special screening of the film.

The next day, on the eve of SiCKO’s sneak peak Saturday, the RNs took their message directly to voters and the presidential candidates.

In the site of the nation’s first presidential primary, undecided voters joined CNA/NNOC registered nurses from New Hampshire, California, Illinois, and Maine with RNs from Massachusetts Nurses Association (MNA), and Healthcare Professionals and Allied Employees-Vermont, all resplendent in their red SiCKO scrubs along with doctors from the Physicians for a National Health Program (PNHP), for the day’s inspired itinerary: a special screening of SiCKO, a town hall meeting, the release of new study on the healthcare industry’s influence on politics by the Institute for Health and Socio-Economic Policy, CNA/NNOC’s research arm, and visits to key presidential candidate campaign headquarters.

A festival feeling prevailed in the two packed theaters in Manchester, where the RNs lead the voters in another rousing ovation for Michael Moore’s powerfully moving depiction of the devastation wrought by American health insurance companies.

At the historic Palace Theater in Manchester, a full house posed questions to Michael Moore, Julie Pinkham, RN, Executive Director of MNA, and Deborah Richter, family physician and member of PNHP in Vermont. CNA/NNOC Executive Director Rose Ann DeMoro moderated a lively discussion highlighted by Pinkham’s demand that the presidential candidates articulate how their healthcare plans achieve universal healthcare, as opposed to health insurance. What good is insurance, the crowd wondered, after seeing SiCKO. Recognizing that New Hampshire voters will set the tone for the presidential election, the event was covered by a sea of journalists.

Things heated up when the discussion turned to money, specifically the contributions the presidential candidates have received from the healthcare industry in the first quarter of 2007.  Moore cited the over $880,000 that Mitt Romney has received from drug, healthcare and insurance companies (what a coincidence that his health plan enacted in Massachusetts mandates that people further enrich the insurance companies -- oh yeah, Schwarzenegger’s plan in California does that, too). Hilary Clinton is up there with over $550,000 from healthcare interests.

The question lingered, is that why all the leading candidates who have taken this money do not favor elimination of the private health insurance companies?

And to find out just how much money the corporate healthcare industry has spent on politics, Moore joined CNA/NNOC president Deborah Burger and National Public Policy Director Michael Lighty for a press conference releasing a new study that found that:

o Massive spending by the healthcare industry is swamping the nation’s political process;
o In federal lobbying, healthcare spending exceed $2.2 billion during the past decade, in which healthcare surpassed all other industry sectors in lobbying expenditures;
o Political action committees for drug and insurance companies, doctors, hospitals, dentists and nursing homes are lavishing millions of dollars on both Democrats and Republicans candidates;
o Democratic Sen. Hilary Clinton and Republican Sen. John McCain together received over 40% of healthcare industry contributions among the 18 major party declared candidates;
o Healthcare industry contributions to the 18 currently announced Republican and Democratic Presidential candidates total an aggregate $12.8 million since 1989, over $3.7 million of that amount just in the first quarter of 2007 alone;
o Hillary Clinton was the largest recipient of these contributions during the first quarter of 2007 in the amount of $868,722, thus making the two candidates most directly identified with healthcare reform, Clinton and Romney, the recipients of 45% of the contributions.

But it was not all facts and figures when the story from SiCKO was shown about Tracey Pierce, who was denied a series of treatments that could have saved his life.  At the end of the clip, Julie Pierce asks why her husband Tracey died when these treatments were available.

Sadly, the IHSP report had an answer: Tracey died because all the wealthy players in the healthcare industry found it in their financial interest to withhold treatment. Pharmaceutical profits climbed to $94.8 billion last year largely because of the high prices they charge for the drugs Tracey’s doctors sought to save his life. The insurance companies made their $57.8 billion in profits in 2006 because they limited access to those drugs and treatments like bone marrow transplants whenever possible. And the hospital chain didn’t want to get stuck with the costs, so when they couldn’t pass them on, they too said no. And Tracey died as all the companies fought to protect their profits.

It’s past time for a solution. Inspired by Moore’s call for presidential candidate to support true universal, comprehensive healthcare, which eliminates the role of the insurance companies and regulates pharmaceutical companies like a utility, and to not solicit or accept healthcare industry money, the RNs got onto the SiCKO bus to demand that the presidential candidates sign the Nurses Pledge for Universal Healthcare.

Confronting the campaigns with the candidates’ own rhetoric about universal healthcare, the RNs brought their own brand of retail politics to the New Hampshire HQ’s. The campaign political directors seemed surprised when two dozen RNs from New Hampshire, the candidates’ home states and from throughout the country, demanded that their candidates change their position and support the elimination of private health insurance companies by signing the Nurses Pledge. The nurses made a point to say how much each candidates took in the first quarter from those companies and other industry giants and demanded that the candidates stop taking the money.  What would the patients think?

Staff from Senators Obama, Clinton and Dodd greeted the RN delegation as did the staff of Mitt Romney and John Edwards. No one was home in the Rudy Giuliani office, and though the lights were on, no one answered the door at John McCain’s office.

After June 29th, when RNs will put on their Scrubs to see SiCKO, the presidential candidates and Congress will have to open the door to a harsh reality: what are they doing to stop the health insurance companies from killing people?