Guaranteed Healthcare

By Donna Smith

When you see the faces of the members of PASNAP (Pennsylvania Association of Staff Nurses and Allied Professionals) on strike at Temple University Hospital and perhaps most especially when you see the faces of their children walking on the picket line with them, you embrace the reality of why these brave RNs and other health professionals were compelled to strike.  This strike is about providing the best possible care for the patients at Temple and doing so in a way that is supported by the health professionals who have given decades of service to the community and to the institution. (story and ACTION item continued next page)

By Donna Smith

PHILADELPHIA – “Should I care if someone else is being exploited?” asked Kate Harkins, 21, of Schuylkill County, PA, who is a junior majoring in American Studies at Temple.  “If we don’t stand up for those workers now, then down the road when we are workers, conditions will not be changed, and we will not be heard.”

As the bells on campus tolled just after noon on Wednesday, protesting students walked to Bell Tower Plaza along Polett Walk with T-shirts that read, “My nurse was a scab,” and they staged a die-in to protest worker exploitation.  Students from Temple University’s Student Labor Action Project said they held the protest in support of the striking nurses and health professionals at Temple University hospital just two subway stops up the Broad Ave – Orange Line from the tree lined campus where they study.

By Donna Smith

A transplant doctor steps into the crowd of picketing nurses and other health professionals at Temple and says how much he hopes this is all over soon.  “I just cannot transplant anyone this way,” he shares. No one takes any pleasure in his statement, but another RN asks him about a patient she was caring for when the strike began just three days ago.  “He’s doing OK,” says the doctor who seems to know the nurse needs some reassurance. “His left lung is, well, he’s doing OK.”  The moment of shared concern for the patient passes as the doctor squeezes the nurse’s arm then moves on and the nurse returns to the picket line.

The strike by the 1500 nurses, healthcare professional and technical employees at Temple University Hospital began this Wednesday morning, so this is day three for the members of the Pennsylvania Association of Staff Nurses and Allied Professionals union, PASNAP.

Doctors, Nurses, Med Students and Patients Join Government and Business Leaders

Calling for Single Payer Reform in Pennsylvania and the Nation

By Donna Smith, community organizer

LANCASTER, PA  -- I haven't seen Dr. Walter Tsou of PNHP (Physicians for a National Health Program)  as much as I would like to since a sweltering June day last year when he welcomed the huge SiCKO bus into Philadelphia.  It isn't that both he and I haven't been out talking about single payer healthcare reform, but we don't often get the opportunity to be in the same place at the same time -- until tonight.

We both were panelists for a forum entitled: Single-Payer, Guaranteed Healthcare for All, A Mainstream Solution.  We were at the historic Franklin and Marshall College in Lancaster, and we were joined by medical students, doctors, nurses, business leaders and legislators. 

This was a powerful bunch of people -- each told a piece of the picture of a broken system and of the single payer solution.  And this is one lobby group I'd match against any in tenacity, intelligence and just plain humanity.  As each spoke, it was clear that respect and passion are hallmarks of this movement.  You cannot buy that sort of lobby effort -- it rises up from the heart and soul of decent Americans fed up with what we know can be so much better.