Issue link: https://nnumagazine.uberflip.com/i/198537
Rose Ann DeMoro Executive Director, CNA/NNOC Lessons Learned The healthcare reform battle in California taught the public the differences between health insurance and healthcare what do you call a healthcare plan that leaves 47 percent of California's 6.8 million uninsured out in the cold; forces Californians to buy insurance products without knowing how much it will cost or what coverage they will receive; fails to improve healthcare quality; encourages employers to drop employee health plans; erodes RN scope of practice; and would double the state deficit? If you're Assembly Speaker Fabian Nuñez, you call it "more progressive and far-reaching than anything under serious consideration by other states." ABX1 1, the "far-reaching" healthcare bill that Nuñez half-baked up with Arnold Schwarzenegger, died a mercifully swift death in California's Senate Health Committee on Jan. 28. The plan received only one vote in favor. Nurses in particular can find plenty of faults with plans that, like ABX1 1, enforce an individual mandate to buy health insurance. For starters, there are the millions of dollars in subsidies that would be redirected from public hospitals to insurers, to sponsor insurance policies for consumers requiring financial assistance. If that's not worrying enough, consider the fact that individual mandate plans provide employers with incentives to discontinue health benefits—meaning the hard-won contract provisions that many nurses have fought for would disappear overnight. What Nuñez and Schwarzenegger failed to understand in California is that there is a vast difference between health insurance and healthcare. Perhaps they hadn't thought to ask the parents of Nataline Sarkisyan, who feel that gulf as an acute and vast emptiness in their hearts. Nataline, 17, died in December 2007 after the Sarkisyan's insurer, CIGNA, denied payment for a liver transplant. Although CIGNA reversed the decision as a result of national protests largely organized by CNA/NNOC, it was too late to save Nataline's life. JA N UA RY | F E BRUA RY 2 0 0 8 If that story seems like an anomaly, Nuñez and Schwarzenegger could have seen evidence to the contrary on our GuaranteedHealthcare.org website, where hundreds of Americans have posted their own personal horror stories. A startling number of them are insured, working citizens who are unable to visit their doctors because the co-pays and deductibles would bankrupt them. Perhaps the speaker and the governor were too busy to bump SiCKO, a featurelength documentary about ordinary Americans whose health insurers stood idly by while they suffered from disease or drowned in debt, to the top of their Netflix queue. Considering all of the above possibilities, you'd think Nuñez would welcome the opportunity to learn all about the significant differences between "insurance" and "care" from Ron Norton. An educator from Massachusetts, Norton fell victim to Mitt Romney's individual mandate plan. Not offered insurance by his employer, ineligible for his wife's employer's plan, and earning too much to qualify for state aid, he faced paying between 11.6 to 20 percent of his salary to provide basic health insurance for his teen daughter and himself. "I wish [the Massachusetts] government would stop catering to the private insurance industry and calling it universal healthcare. It's not, and the biggest victims of this scam are the middle class," Norton told California lawmakers in a healthcare hearing. Or would have told them, if the hearing hadn't been canceled and he hadn't been escorted out of the Capitol rotunda by the California Highway Patrol. Under Nuñez's orders, the CHP ushered Norton and members of the Foundation for Taxpayer and Consumer Rights from the rotunda, giving FTCR representatives a misdemeanor charge for speaking to the media within the Capitol building, although the rotunda is a popular spot for lobbyists to speak with the press. W W W. C A L N U R S E S . O R G Thanks to people like Norton, the Sarkisyans, and the multitude of brave citizens who have told their stories on GuaranteedHealthcare.org and to Michael Moore, the message that ABX1 1 was a loser was loud and resounding. More importantly, it highlighted singlepayer as a viable alternative—indeed, the only viable alternative—to market-based reform. Healthcare is this nation's third concern after the war in Iraq and the economy at home, and is already a defining issue in this year's presidential campaign. Massachusetts and California are not anomalies: there are a multitude of local and national politicians who labor under the assumption that it simply hadn't occurred to the uninsured to buy insurance policies, and who are convinced that the way to eliminate the unsightly masses of uninsured "health-poor" in our country is to simply make them illegal. Even as the costs of Massachusetts's blunder grow out of control, a number of governors, representatives, and senators, including Hillary Clinton, eye individual mandates as an appealing quick fix to the growing ranks of uninsured. Massachusetts is struggling with a health "plan" that is running the state into the red and cementing the middle and working classes in debt. California, the nation's most populous state, the world's eighth-largest economy, and arguably America's testing ground for unusual reforms, narrowly averted doubling its deficit overnight. The implications for other states are dire, should the individual mandate revival tent come to town. The swan song of the Nuñez-Schwarzenegger plan was deeply satisfying, but now is not the time to rest on our laurels. With ABX1 1's defeat, the stage is more primed than ever for the healthcare providers of this country to aggressively fight for what America deserves: no less than guaranteed healthcare for life, for everybody, no matter what. I Rose Ann DeMoro is executive director of CNA/NNOC. REGISTERED NURSE 9