National Nurses United

STEVE MARCUS/REUTERS/NEWSCOM NewsBriefs_NOV 12/10/10 1:28 AM Page 9 cuts to social safety net services like Medicaid – the list goes on. At the same time, she proposed capital gains tax cuts for the rich. Throughout Whitman's campaign, CNA nurses constantly challenged her about her platform, often through hilarious parodies and skits featuring her fictional alter ego, "Queen Meg," at her events. Many champions of working people breathed a major sigh of relief when Brown handily beat Whitman by 7 percentage points on Nov. 2. Likewise, U.S. Sen. Barbara Boxer from California easily defeated former HewlettPackard CEO Carly Fiorina, another millionaire corporate candidate, by an almost 10-point margin. Polls had tracked the race as much closer, but NNU nurses steadfastly championed Boxer, who is sponsoring federal NNU legislation establishing safe RNto-patient ratios nationwide. And in almost all other California races, the CNA/NNUbacked candidate won, a testament to the power and influence of unionized registered nurses in that state. Another major win for NNU nurses was the reelection of U.S. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid as the senior senator from Nevada over Tea Party candidate Sharron Angle. Reid had been lagging in the polls leading up to Election Day, but pulled out a win over Angle by a more than 5 percent margin, thanks partly to Nevada NNOC RN members who staged a spirited "Wrong Angle" campaign to show voters why Angle was not the right person to represent Nevada in the Senate. "I couldn't believe it was as close as it was," said Angelique Kennedy, an RN at Saint Mary's Regional Medical Center in Reno, Nev., who worked on the Wrong Angle campaign. "I think labor really made a difference and is what pulled it out for Reid. Harry Reid winning this race didn't just affect Nevada, it affected the whole country and, for nurses, whether we get national ratios and ratios in Nevada." And in Washington, D.C., the work of the District of Columbia Nurses Association helped elect Vincent Gray to the mayor's office. —Staff report NOVEMBER 2010 States Stepping Toward Single-Payer T hanks to the work of registered nurses and other single-payer advocates across the nation, the untold story of the midterm 2010 elections is the encouraging news for singlepayer. Prospects for single-payer healthcare reform efforts on a state-by-state basis brightened even as other progressive issues faced uncertainty following November's elections. In Vermont, Democrat Peter Shumlin, a strong supporter of single-payer, was elected governor. Before the election, Vermont's Legislature passed a bill commissioning Dr. William Hsiao of Harvard University (and chief architect of Taiwan's single-payer system) to prepare three design and implementation plans for a statewide healthcare system, and the Legislature designated that one of those design plans must be a singlepayer system. Hsiao's plans will likely be presented in January 2011, and Governor-elect Shumlin has already been lobbying President Barack Obama to secure the federal waiver Vermont needs to pursue a singlepayer system. With Shumlin's election, chances are good that a single-payer plan in Vermont would survive legislative scrutiny and be signed by the governor into la The w. state-by-state movement to enact singlepayer may gain its first toehold in Vermont. In Hawaii, former Rep. Neil Abercrombie, who had cosponsored the federal singlepayer bill HR 676, was elected as governor and brings hope for single-payer in that state. In Massachusetts, where nurses have worked steadfastly to improve care for patients under the strain of their state's insurance mandates, also known as Chapter 58 or "Romney-care" after their former governor Mitt Romney, voters in 14 districts overwhelmingly passed non-binding resolutions supporting single-payer reform, the largest number to date of districts to simultaneously pass these resolutions. Sandy Eaton, a Massachusetts RN who sits on the steering committee of the Labor Campaign for Single-Payer Healthcare, said that activists targeted districts represented by key legislative leaders and those with vacancies. The resolutions were direct and simple: The ballot question simply asked voters whether or not to instruct their local representative to "support legislation establishing W W W. N A T I O N A L N U R S E S U N I T E D . O R G healthcare as a human right regardless of age, state of health, or employment status, by creating a single-payer health insurance system like Medicare that is comprehensive, cost effective, and publicly provided to all residents of Massachusetts." "People already have concerns that the Massachusetts plan we have is not the way to go," said Karen Higgins, a Massachusetts RN and NNU copresident. "We see costs being passed from employers to employees or companies just changing to cheaper plans. I think this is the people saying, 'This is not working.' We need to push and say that single-payer is the answer." And while no one in California would see Jerry Brown's election as a slam dunk for single-payer in a state that has twice passed the measure only to have it vetoed twice by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, the state now has the opportunity to look for a strategic single-payer solution that would never have seen the light of day had Meg Whitman been elected. California, with the world's eighth-largest economy and 37 million people, provides an excellent environment for establishing a progressively financed, single standard of high-quality care through single-payer reform. "Nurses know insurance companies don't provide any value in the delivery of medicine," said Malinda Markowitz, RN and a copresident of the California Nurses Association, which has been an outspoken advocate of single-payer. "Under a singlepayer system in California, we would be free of their interference, denial of care, massive bureaucracy, and waste of care dollars. " In other states, some state legislators who supported state-based single-payer legislation lost their seats, so the struggle to move forward will shift to broader public education and economic arguments for supporting a transformed system. All in all, in the face of Republican sweeps in many states and races, many lawmakers who favor single-payer reform are still standing and some new allies and potential allies have been elected. But whether candidates win or lose, nurses will continue their fight to bring healthcare justice through single-payer reforms for many months ahead. —Donna Smith N AT I O N A L N U R S E 9

• Cover