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Pensions:1 copy 7/22/09 9:50 PM Page 15 Standing on Her Own Two Feet Lambro's pension story starts in a small Ohio town in the 1940s, with a tall, wiry man with dark hair holding forth at the dinner table. Lambro's father, Nicholas Chordas, was a factory worker, high school graduate, and the child of parents who immigrated to the United States from the Georgian area of Russia. He worked two jobs when he had to, helped renovate and repair his own and family members' houses, and amazed his daughter with his financial ingenuity. "I swear to God, I think he had a tree he could pull dollar bills off of," said the 69-year-old retired RN, now a resident of Milpitas, Calif. "If something was broken in the house, it wasn't broken for long. My parents didn't live in the fast lane or even the middle lane, but they took care of business." That is, until the 1970s, when he retired. Without pensions and dependent on Social Security, Lambro watched as a heart attack, prostate trouble, and then congestive heart failure meant he couldn't do household repairs himself – and his fixed income meant he sometimes couldn't hire someone to do it for him. They didn't come visit her in California often, and when they did, she was forbidden to offer to help pay. "My mother called one time: 'The hot water heater broke.' They'd never say they couldn't afford to fix it. It was always, 'We're going to get this done as soon as we can,'" she said. The tree from which he plucked those dollar bills, it appeared, had stopped giving. So in 1968, after Lambro transferred jobs from St. Mary's Hospital in San Francisco to Alexian Brothers Hospital in San Jose, she always pushed for pensions. "What's a high priority for nurses is always pay, but I used to say, 'Yeah, but we need decent benefits too,'" she said. "'You have to understand that we are going to be old one day, and what are you going to live on? You have to look to the future.' I looked at my husband, who was a teacher and he had a pension, and I thought, 'My God, we've got to fight for one too.'" But to get there, Lambro had to overcome not just those nurses who would rather settle for the short-term goal of higher pay, but also the prevailing attitude toward nursing at the time. "I was told by a nun [at one hospital where I worked] that this should be enough for you, the mere pleasure of being a nurse," she deadpanned. "I think a lot of times, the management looked at us as, well, we're just women, and women will live off their husbands' retirement. As it turned out, I ended up getting a divorce later in life. I look back now and think, 'My God, women were supposed to live off their husbands?'" It took almost two decades, but eventually management agreed to a small pension. Then it was a process of gradually improving the pension with every new contract. When her hospital was sold to Hospital Corporation of America and became Regional Medical Center of San Jose, the new owner was required to honor the contracts, and the pensions. When Lambro retired in 2005, she was able to collect two pensions: Almost $1,000 a month from the Alexian Brothers and close to $900 a month from Regional Medical Center. Add in her Social Security, and Lambro brings home just a few hundred dollars shy of her monthly income when she was working. She also has a 401(k) to which she was able to contribute the maximum amount allowed during her later years at Regional Medical Center. For her, retirement wasn't the financial shock she thought it might be. "I was afraid of what it would be like, since I didn't have a husband, someone to help me pay my bills," she said. "But I found that I JUNE 2009 could do it: I could stand on my own two feet with two pensions and Social Security. I'm going to be able to make it." She's been able to do things her parents could hardly afford. She took a trip to Alaska last year. She regularly visits family and friends across the country. She took a little money out of her 401(k) to help pay for her son's wedding later this year in Texas. She thinks her father would be proud. "Oh yeah, he would just love [where I'm at now]," she said, chuckling. "I learned from my parents that I wanted to be a little better off than they were. To rely totally on the government is not the thing to do. That's why a pension from employers is so important. I don't care what you do in life; your employer should give you something back for all those years of work." ■ Heather Boerner is a freelance health and medical writer based in San Francisco. A Uniquely American Mess (continued from page 10) adept at adverse selection to get the healthiest enrollees, offering them cheaper, barebones plans with high deductibles and limited coverage while sicker people will by necessity go into the public plan for the care they need. The inevitable result: an underfunded public plan unable to compete with the private plans because it has enrollees who cost more to cover, so the public plan either steadily rations care to keep up, or goes bankrupt. Healthier patients who buy cheaper, high-deductible plans with limited services gamble with their health, hoping they don't get seriously ill. Although the public option has become the principle some Congress members and liberal constituency groups say is their bottom line, withering opposition from the insurance industry and Congressional conservatives make it just as likely the public option will be substantially eroded—or dropped entirely from a final bill. The insurers, not wanting anything that will cut into their profits as some paying customers go into the public plan, are fighting the public option as hard as they would oppose single-payer. The story could have a far different ending. President Obama could use the considerable clout of his office and the mandate of his huge election victory last November to fight for the single-payer reform he once embraced. And, he'd have the dedicated support of the majority of the nation's nurses, doctors, and thousands of single-payer activists across the country—plus the power of public on his side, as evidenced by the 85 percent of Americans who told the New York Times in June that "our healthcare system should be fundamentally changed or completely rebuilt." Other presidents have taken on that challenge, as Helen Thomas, dean of the White House press corps, reminded us in a late-June commentary: "President Lyndon Johnson had the courage to weigh in with all his clout to win passage of Medicare and Medicaid. President Roosevelt put all his chips on the table to win passage of the Social Security Act that makes the elderly more secure," she wrote. For Obama, by contrast, she concluded, a "universal healthcare system based on the single-payer model appears to be a bridge too far." President Obama has already embraced a number of laudable policies and demonstrated myriad admirable traits. The political will to fight for the healthcare reform we so desperately need is not one of them. ■ Rose Ann DeMoro is executive director of CNA/NNOC. W W W. C A L N U R S E S . O R G REGISTERED NURSE 15