Guaranteed Healthcare

The second in the series of ads challenging Democratic Presidential candidates to get serious on healthcare launches in Iowa today—addressing Sen. Clinton—while nurses and doctors will converge on an upcoming Presidential forum with their critiques.

We'll take a look, cross-posted at the [http://www.GuaranteedHealthcare.org/blog 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 goal of the ad campaign—sponsored by the National Nurses Organizing Committee and Physicians for a National Health Program—is to challenge the  politicians to offer better healthcare proposals.  When your ideas are a daring mix of Mitt Romney’s and Arnold Schwarzenegger's…you need to try harder.

With the new ad, which debuts this morning, Regena Ellis, a neo-natal intensive care unit nurse, reminds a cardboard stand-in for Sen. Clinton that “nurses know 50 Americans die every day because they don’t have health coverage. Insurance and drug companies spend millions on lobbyists to keep control of the system” to block real change.

“I don’t want to be forced to choose between which patients get the best care, between who lives and who dies. Do you Sen. Clinton?” asks Ellis.

The ad calls on viewers to “let the Democratic candidates for president know that real leadership on healthcare doesn’t mean just being better than the Republicans.”  Yesterday's ad focused on Edwards; tomorrow's on Obama.

Created by Bill Hillsman and North Woods Advertising, the ad can be seen on YouTube at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bz9cm613Ox8 .

On Saturday, at 3:30 outside an Iowa AFL-CIO event at the Hawkeye Downs exposition hall in Cedar Rapids, nurses and doctors will hold a press conference speaking to the cardboard stand-ins for Clinton, Obama, and Edwards.  Come on by!

[http://www.calitics.com/showDiary.do?diaryId=3525 Meanwhile, healthcare hero and California state Senator Sheila Kuehl] criticized the insurance-centered healthcare plans so many politicians (and insurers) are supporting:

<blockquote> California families are becoming so hurt and so incensed at insurance company greed and abuse that they are increasingly willing, like nurse Cynthia Campbell's husband, to pick up a megaphone and plead "Don't Kill My Wife" in front of Blue Shield's headquarters.  And the transformation crosses the political spectrum.  Art DeWerk, the Police Chief for the central valley town of Ceres, spoke out recently in favor of single payer as he described the helplessness he felt after his wife was unable to get timely access to routine medical care as she battled cancer.

These and other stories are found all too often in a health care system where the only competition is between insurance companies focused only on how much risk they can avoid, instead of the more appropriate competition between direct health care providers for quality service, driven by a single payer system that allows total patient choice of doctors and hospitals. And stories like those set out above, as well as others, even worse, will continue until we ditch the "system" that spends 30% of every health care dollar simply to weed out those of us who are sick enough to need our coverage and move to a real universal healthcare system that eliminates the middleman and returns decision making in healthcare to doctors and patients. 

To join the fight for guaranteed healthcare (with a “Medicare for All” or SinglePayer financing), visit [http://www.guaranteedhealthcare.org/ GuaranteedHealthcare.org, a project of the National Nurses Organizing Committee/California Nurses Association.]