Guaranteed Healthcare

All Tracy Pierce wanted was to be given a chance to fight his cancer. His insurance coverage wouldn’t even give him that.

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!

Nurses take their work very seriously but they also love to have fun as you'll see in this creative new YouTube show dubbed "ACCESS HEALTHCARE" which borrows a few ideas from "Access Hollywood," "ET," "Extra," and the like. Go backstage with Michael Moore, experience the buzz around his new movie SiCKO, see the latest RN fashions, and JOIN the movement for guaranteed healthcare in America.

Click here to see the first edition of "ACCESS HEALTHCARE" on YouTube and join us June 29th

It’s almost SiCKO Day in California!  Tomorrow, June 12, Michael Moore storms the California Capitol along with 1,000 nurses for the first public screening on his new horror film, er, documentary SiCKO.   This is the first big public event for the movie, and will feature the annoucnement of the "Scrubs for SiCKO" campaign by the California Nurses Association/National Nurses Organizing Committee which will ensure at least one nurse or doctor is in every opening night showing of the film.  This movie is a tremendous opportunity to push the untrustworthy insurance corporations out of the delivery of healthcare—and to support politicians dedicated to increasing healthcare NOT increasing private insurance.  This is a crucial step towards guaranteeing healthcare on the single-payer model. Fortunately the press is on it; let’s take a look below.

Bring your red scrubs to SiCKO's opening night and help the nurses turn this movie masterpiece into a social movement—this pop culture into political change. The California Nurses Association/National Nurses Organizing Committee is acting as co-host of the opening night of SiCKO at 3,000 theaters around the country.  We are working with an unprecedented national coalition of nurse and doctor and health care activist groups to ensure SiCKO has a long-term impact on our nation’s healthcare system and politics. It’s an incredible opportunity for patient advocates and it’s only missing one element: you.  What are you doing the evening of Friday June 29th?   

Please check back for details--Michael Moore will be here to chat about his new healthcare blockbuster movie SiCKO and how RNs and other patient advocates can use it to change healthcare in this country. Date and time to be announced! Please check back and join us!

The political terrain is shifting underneath the “Big 3” Democratic presidential candidates as they take baby steps on the nation’s most urgent domestic issue: healthcare. While their campaigns try to negotiate with the toxic health insurance sector, in the hopes of making them slightly less dangerous to patients, public dislike of these bad actors is about to be crystallized by Michael Moore’s powerful new film SiCKO.   

Barack Obama has released his healthcare plan—and it is a bitter disappointment to patient advocates around the country who hoped that he would ‘turn the page’ on the broken healthcare system that is causing our nation so much anguish.

There are two basic options for healthcare reform: increase the role of health insurance companies or replace them.  Obama has chosen to give more customers and more public funds to the for-profit insurance corporations. It’s an expensive gift and one that allows them to continue meddling in medical decision-making while raking in obscene blood-money profits.

Clearly Sen. Obama needs to see Michael Moore’s new movie SiCKO, which lays out what the American people already know about health insurance corporations: they are a malevolent lot who make a buck by denying care to patients.  The National Nurses Organizing Committee will be co-hosting premiers of SiCKO around the country—and we hope that Sen. Obama will join some RNs to learn what’s really happening on the front lines of America’s healthcare tragedy.

Synergy = Momentum!  Yesterday the 75,000 members of the California Nurses Association/National Nurses Organizing Committee joined the AFL-CIO.  No big deal you think?  Wrong.  The 325,000 RNs now consolidated in the labor movement have become a corps of committed activists for guaranteed healthcare on  the single-payer model.  Don’t underestimate them—especially as SiCKO continues to roil the national debate over healthcare.  

The Wall St. Journal is freaking the heck out about Michael Moore’s new movie SiCKO.  Obviously they’ll   fan the flames of controversy and drive more ticket sales.  But their terror makes clear what a great moment we have ehre: finally the American people’s fear and loathing of drug and insurance companies is about to hit the big screen, which is just what this country’s ill healthcare system needs.  The question for us: how to leverage this into the most on-the-ground advances for healthcare reform?  Your thoughts are needed…