The NNU is in its final days of completing a poll for the primary in the Presidential race. 

If you are an NNU member and did not receive the poll, please contact vote@votenursesvalues.org at once to request a copy.

The Medicare and Medicaid bill passed both houses of congress by an overwhelming vote. President Johnson signs it into law on July 30, 1965. Harry Truman was present at the signing and Johnson helped Truman sign-up for Medicare.

It was past midnight Thursday night ebbing into Friday morning when CNA/NNU Executive Director RoseAnn DeMoro announced the report of the final numbers from the vote count at Kaiser Permanente’s flagship Southern California hospital.

“CNA, 696, UNAC, 305, no union, 1” – sparking cheers, and some tears of joy, hands raised, and song from hundreds of Kaiser’s Los Angeles Medical Center RNs adorned in CNA’s signature red scrubs, T-shirts, lanyards, and “Vote CNA” pins. They were gathered in front of the large hospital on Los Angeles’ fabled Sunset Boulevard.

The celebration culminated months of work by RNs, many of whom aspired for years to be a part of CNA, linking up with 19,000 CNA Kaiser RNs in Northern and Central California, who have long established a banner reputation of no nonsense advocacy for patients and nurses.

To the 1,200 LAMC nurses, CNA’s record stood in stark contrast to unions, like UNAC, which through Kaiser’s Labor Management Partnership have muted the voice of union members, and regularly placed patient, public, and worker advocacy as secondary to Kaiser’s business goals.  The result — an impressive 89 percent of LAMC RNs voted in the historic election  by a landslide margin of 70 to 30 percent for CNA. 

“If there is anyone out there who doubts that CNA is the right choice for us, tonight is the answer,” said Tessie Costales, RN, an intensive care unit nurse at LAMC, at a celebration party at a nearby restaurant after the final count.

“It’s the answer that we have waited for; we are the answer that will lead those who have been told by so many to be cynical and fearful and doubtful of what we can achieve to be part of history and hope for a better tomorrow for years to come. A season of spring has begun. We will lead that change,” Costales added to cheers.

“CNA,” said Joel Briones, a critical care RN at LAMC, “is not just a union, it’s a movement.”

“We are fighting for a social movement,” agreed DeMoro, speaking to the RNs shortly after. “We are going to transform this country, to address social and economic inequality” that is reflected in those who “can’t get the level of care they need” from healthcare corporations that elevate profits over patient need.

As David Johnson, CNA organizing director observed, issues at stake for so many CNA members. “There is a fundamental conflict between the drive for more profit” in the healthcare industry “and the nurses desire to care for their patients. That conflict underlies everything we do in this organization and in fighting for justice in this society.”

“I’ve never seen a group of nurses so dedicated to being a part of the CNA family and changing the health care system and changing the world,” DeMoro said.

That determination drove a historic organizing campaign by the LAMC RNs. They had the double challenge of uniting to address their growing concerns about patient care conditions – that led to a two-day strike in late April, exceedingly rare at a time they had no union representation officially recognized by the employer  — while also confronting the collusion of a labor management partnership union with the employer.

“In spite of Kaiser’s blatant favoritism to a management union, we believe we will be able to sit down with Kaiser and negotiate a good agreement for the LAMC nurses, as we have for the Northern and Central California Kaiser RNs,” DeMoro said Friday.

One post-election moment perhaps best symbolized Kaiser’s sympathies in the election – a company memo offering counseling and “emotional support” to UNAC supporters, and probably their own managers distraught over the results.

“Be focused more on the future than the past,” the memo read, warning that “personal anxieties can overwhelm and lead to emotional blocking” with times allotted for staff to meet with Employee Assistance Program counselors. 

SURVEY SAYS! 85% of RNs agree that the quality of patient care in Massachusetts’ hospitals is suffering due to unsafe patient assignments. Nurses across the country continue their fight for patient safety.

Perhaps the best window to the top winners in the Supreme Court ruling on the Affordable Care Act could be seen 200 miles up the road, on Wall Street.

Within minutes of the decision, health care industry stocks were soaring, led by hospital and insurance corporations.

HCA, the biggest U.S. hospital chain, stock immediately jumped 9 percent.  Stock for another giant for-profit hospital chain Tenet Healthcare rose 6 percent. Health insurance stocks were also booming for corporate giants Aetna, Cigna, and Anthem.

The bubbly reaction by the traders was a punctuation mark for the most quoted phrase from Chief Justice John Roberts’ 6-3 majority decision, “Congress passed the Affordable Care Act to improve health insurance markets, not to destroy them.”

The Court ruling does provide a reprieve for several million low and moderate-income people who depend on federal tax subsidies to buy private health insurance, as now required by the ACA.

Yet, as Roberts signaled, the decision is ultimately a reminder that the ACA, based on a model developed by corporate think tanks and a Massachusetts law enacted under former Republican governor Mitt Romney, has served first and foremost to further cement and expand the insurance-based private healthcare system in the U.S.

Following passage of the ACA, healthcare industry profits, which dipped during the 2008 Wall Street collapse, have soared to record levels.

The ACA mandated millions of new customers for the private insurance companies. With its financial incentives for electronic health records, the law encouraged a huge windfall for information technology firms. Added payments for drugs, and the refusal to allow the federal government to negotiate bulk discount rates from the pharmaceutical giants, encouraged accelerated drug profits.

And big hospital chains are also back making record profits, with the assist of more payments from insurers and the failure to set any real limits on hospital price gouging. In fact, the ACA encourages corporate consolidation that drives up prices.

Those are all the “markets” Chief Justice Roberts so adroitly noted the Act was intended to improve.

But in daily practice, the world nurses see every day at the bedside, the picture is decidedly mixed.

With its limits on disgraceful insurance restrictions, the ACA has certainly helped patients and families who were shut out by insurers for pre-existing conditions, dropped when they got sick, or financially devastated by caps on coverage.

Yet un-payable medical bills remain the leading cause of personal bankruptcy as the law’s failure to set meaningful cost controls still leaves far too many patients with bills they can not pay, or choosing to skip needed medical care because of the high cost.

In a comprehensive analysis on the eve of the Court ruling in Harpers magazine, Columbia Journalism Review contributing editor Trudy Lieberman aptly deconstructs “the failed promise of the Affordable Care Act.”

At the center of this huge shortfall is what Lieberman calls the “Great Cost Shift” – how the law promotes “the transfer of the growing price of medical care to patients themselves through high deductibles, coinsurance, copayments, and limited provider networks,” especially by encouraging employers to offer scaled back or skeletal health coverage.

For patients sent into the ACA’s health exchanges, whether the state or federal versions, average deductibles, even in the least expensive bronze policies, are a whopping #5,181 for individuals and $10,545 for families.

Even for families on limited incomes who will, as a result of the Court ruling, still get the federal subsidies to buy the health plans in the first place, that math is daunting – one reason, Lieberman quotes an analyst noting we’re replacing the crisis of un-insurance with underinsurance, and a reason from a fourth to a third of people who signed up on the federal or state exchanges the first year have declined to renew.

The key point here, as Lieberman emphasizes, is the conservative ideological framework of market-based medical care, which undergirds the ACA. Without effective controls on profiteering and price gouging, the ACA and market solution for cost controls is, as one of her health policy experts Jonathan Oberlander of the University of North Carolina notes, “making sick people pay more.”

Ultimately, it means the ACA has helped a number of people get into a system that previously shut them out, but it has not come close to solving our long healthcare nightmare. And, by its structure, it never will.

America’s nurses have long campaigned for genuine, comprehensive health care reform, the fundamental idea, as most other industrialized countries have long held, that everyone should be guaranteed access to a single standard of safe therapeutic care.

Until we have a humane healthcare system in place that is not based on ability to pay, age, gender, ethnicity, or where you live, healthcare will continue to be a privilege, oriented to profits, not based on patient need.

That is precisely why nurses are continuing to campaign for expanding and updating Medicare to cover everyone.

July 30 marks the 50th anniversary of the enactment of Medicare, achieved against the considerable opposition of the healthcare industry (including one of their leading spokesmen, an actor named Ronald Reagan).

National Nurses United will be joining with labor, community, and healthcare activists across the country in events across the U.S., to mark the occasion, and remind us of the need to continue fighting for the real solution for healthcare reform. To join the actions, look for details at http://www.medicareturns50.org.

Please Vote Today for NNU and RoseAnn DeMoro in the 100 Most Influential People in Healthcare Poll

Please vote today for NNU Executive Director RoseAnn DeMoro in the annual poll by Modern Healthcare on the 100 Most Influential People in Healthcare.

Modern Healthcare, a healthcare industry publication, conducts an annual poll on the 100 Most Influential People in Healthcare is underway.


Please vote today. Then, please get your co-workers, friends, family to vote as well.
 
Go here to vote and click on the Next button at the bottom of the page. You must vote for 5. We are not recommending any others to vote for as random selection is statistically the best approach.
 


As Modern Healthcare focuses on the healthcare industry, most of the nominees are healthcare corporate executives, along with well known politicians.

Electing RoseAnn is an important recognition of the essential work of NNU, and RoseAnn’s achievements in fighting for nurses, patients, and healthcare, economic, and environmental justice. Her election in these polls sends a message to your employer and the industry as a whole. Please add your voice.
 


Again, please vote. Get everyone else you know to vote too.

After Congress voted to pass Fast Track now it goes back to the Senate. ACT NOW to stop Fast Track from passing! Call your Senators!