The National Nurses Organizing Committee (NNOC) today kicked off a national road show and outreach campaign designed to inform voters about the healthcare proposals of both leading Presidential candidates. 5 swing states will be targeted for this healthcare outreach, with Nevada up first.
As one nurse from St. Mary’s Medical Center in Reno put it, "Our patients are voters too, and we’re here to get them the information they need."
The road show hits 11 different Nevada cities stops this week—everywhere from Reno to Elko to the Shoshone Reservation—with a striking wrapped bus featuring the nurses’ report cards on Obama and McCain. Next week, the bus turns left and heads to Ohio, Pennsylvania, Manchester NH and Bangor ME (along with a visit to healthcare hero Eric Massa, running for Congress in New York.) It launched today with a rally at the Northern Nevada Labor Temple, the local AFL-CIO office.
The RNs will hand out a version of the report card at stops along the way, and mail a different version to both RNs and voters around the state. Nurses and labor activists from across the country will follow the mail with phone calls to a targeted list largely composed of nurses and voters who are likely to want healthcare information, particularly non-partisan women. The campaign will be supported by advertising in the local areas the bus is visiting. The report cards gives Obama a B+, McCain an F, and calls on all candidates to support HR 676, which guarantees healthcare with a single-payer system such as Medicare for All.
Donna Smith, a star of the movie SiCKO and now a healthcare organizer for NNOC (and their sister union, the California Nurses Association), commented on the first day:
Nurses shared their report card for the candidates where they rate Sen. Obama's plan better that Sen. McCain's plan because Obama improves access to care while McCain's plans to tax employer-based healthcare benefits and may cause as many as 20 million more people to lose access to coverage and care.
Out on the sidewalks, citizens welcomed the chance to talk with the nurses on a cool fall day. One young man became angry when he thought the nurses were representing the health care industry -- "No, I don't want to talk to you. i owe the healthcare industry thousands..."
But he stopped and listened when told the nurses are advocating HR676, the National Health Insurance Act -- single payer healthcare for all.
The road show will undoubtedly bring some surprises -- as the nurses take their message far and wide. But the trust patients feel for nurses clearly softened even the most campaign-message-weary. Citizens know who speaks the truth and who has a hidden agenda.
And during these last weeks of what has been a two-year long presidential campaign cycle, nurses break through the din of attack ads and economic shell shock with a clear, clean message: healthcare is a basic human right that we can and should provide one another. It's in the nation's best interests.
Like the young man Donna talked to, many many Nevadans are hurting economically—which makes this the right message for the right time. Rose Ann DeMoro, executive director of NNOC and CNA was thinking of patients like that one when she asked "If We Can Nationalize Banks, Why Not Health Care?":
Through the simple, cost effective approach of improving and expanding Medicare to cover everyone, the U.S. could effectively nationalize the financing of healthcare delivery, a single-payer system, while leaving intact the most private system of hospitals and doctors. ... If it's good enough for every other industrialized country, if it's good enough for the speculators and CEOs who have mortgaged our financial security, it ought to be good enough for the rest of America.
Indeed.