Tuesday, May 12, is Florence Nightingale Day--and the chance to honor our first nurse with a "revolt of the nurses and doctors" protest against Sen. Max Baucus and the health insurance corporations who are doing their best to undermine healthcare reform, this time by excluding all mention of single-payer healthcare reforms from the Senate Finance debate over healthcare financing.
We urge all nurses and doctors and patients who are in the Washington D.C. area to join the Florence Nightingale Day protests this Tuesday from 10 a.m. to 12 noon right outside the Dirksen Senate Office Building, at 1st St. and Constitution Ave., right near Union Station in Washington, D.C. (Caregivers, wear your scrubs!)
If you can't make it, you can join in: Fax Max Baucus (and other Congressional Committee chairs) to demand single-payer have a place at the table, and a voice in the debates.
Two activists caregiver organizations—the National Nurses Organizing Committee/California Nurses Association, and Physicians for a National Health Program--are issuing this public health alert because the care that patients receive is being undermined by the actions of Senator Baucus inside the halls of Congress, and his efforts to allow insurers to continue their harmful practices.
"Apprehension, uncertainty, waiting, expectation, fear of surprise, do a patient more harm than any exertion," said Florence Nightingale, (b. May 12, 1820 - d. Aug 13, 1910), wrote more than 150 years ago. Yet all these years later, patients in the United States must endure all of the worries Nightingale wrote of at the hands of the for-profit, private insurance industry. And those worries, those fears will not be solved if Max Baucus' plans to expand and enhance the power of the insurance industry are allowed to pass as healthcare reform.
For decades, the nurses of the California Nurses Association and National Nurses Organizing Committee have advocated for their patients when powerful interests stood between them. Because the current work being done in Congress is continuing to put patients at risk and into the states described so appropriately by nurse Nightingale so long ago, these protest actions must be undertaken as acts of patient advocacy for which nurses are professionally responsible.
Last week, the "Baucus 8" healthcare activists showed America how you must advocate for genuine healthcare reform in the age of Baucus...by getting arrested. One after the other, the 8 stood up to protest the exclusion of single-payer supporters from our Congressional debate over healthcare reform. Senator Baucus was forced to respond..."I personally care deeply" about the single payer viewpoint, he said, as he called for more police to take away the single payer voices.
Baucus is Congress' #3 recipient of ca$h from the health insurers and this is his payback to them, the interests he has thus far cared for very deeply by allowing those interests to craft the nation's health reform. (Read more here from the Columbia Journalism Review’s Trudy Lieberman on Baucus.
And that's why we need the Florence Nightingale Day Protests. Because when Baucus allows his insurance industry donors to be the only voice at the table, the first effect is to end genuine debate over not just single-payer, but also over what possible "public option" might best lead to single-payer.
The facts are plain: single-payer healthcare systems in Europe, Asia, and Canada outperform America's at half the cost. Any so-called expert who is blind to this fact is hardly "the best and the brightest" who should be leading our healthcare debate.
A recent study found that 59% of American physicians support single-payer reform, and it is a signature issue of the national nurses movement. But in Max Baucus world--the world of someone who's taken hundreds of thousands of dollars from insurance companies--this unified opinion of nurses and doctors means nothing, other than that more police are needed. Are we really considering a healthcare bill in opposition to what our frontline caregivers know is necessary?
We will protest Max Baucus and the health insurers with the Florence Nightingale Day Protest because we cannot afford to fail at healthcare reform this year. There are those who believe that single-payer healthcare is politically unfeasible. Is it feasible to pass healthcare reform that will fail? Is it feasible to let insurance companies continue to take 30% off the top of every healthcare dollar they touch? Is it feasible to let the very insurance industry that has destroyed our healthcare dominate the discussion for rewriting it? The American people want genuine solutions and the health insurance industry and their allies like Max Baucus are in danger of denying that.
If you can’t make it to Washington Tuesday, 500 Registered Nurses will be rallying Wednesday for guaranteed healthcare in Upper Senate Park, in what will be the first summit of the national nurses movement.
JOIN The Florence Nightingale Day Protests: Fax Max Baucus (and other committee chairmen, and demand him single-payer have a place at the table!