Issue link: https://nnumagazine.uberflip.com/i/119584
reimbursements. All of which will further strengthen a healthcare system already too focused on profits rather than patient need. ���Medicare is far more effective than the broken private system in controlling costs and the waste that goes to insurance paperwork and profits, and it is universally popular, even among those who bitterly opposed the Obama law,��� said Higgins. ���Let���s open it up to everyone. No one should have to wait to be 65 to be guaranteed healthcare.��� NNU will continue to work at both the state and national levels for guaranteed healthcare through expanded Medicare. More than a dozen states have active single-payer movements, and the ACA does allow state waivers in 2017 to expand beyond the ACA; activists are pushing to move the waiver date up to 2014. Nationally, nurses will work with a broad array of existing healthcare and community activists to improve Medicare through such steps as ending the creeping privatization of administration and services, increasing funding, and expanding Medicare as more people see a need to solve, once and for all, a patient care crisis that will not end with the Supreme Court decision. RATIOS AT RISK (Continued from page 11) hospital upper management get this? Perhaps if the CEO was a registered nurse, not a businessman with an MBA, things might be better.��� NNU members and staff across the country hear stories like these every day. It���s the reason why NNU has sponsored national legislation S. 992, introduced by California Sen. Barbara Boxer, and H.R. 2187 by Illinois Rep. Jan Schakowsky and state bills from Nevada to Florida. It���s why nurses in California, with the solidarity and support of nurses throughout the United States, will never accept a return to the days when California patients had to call 911 from their hospital beds to get help and be silent in the face of the latest insidious threat to the hard-won law to protect patients. And no joint venture of a corrupted labor leader with the hospital industry can change that. RoseAnn DeMoro is executive director of National Nurses United. Charles Idelson is communications director of National Nurses United. JUNE 2012 W W W. N AT I O N A L N U R S E S U N I T E D . O R G N AT I O N A L N U R S E 17