Nurses Association won’t bend on health reform
By Timm Herdt
Ventura County Star
Wednesday, September 12, 2007
John Graham, a hulking man with sad eyes, wearing a shirt only half buttoned, looked the part Tuesday of a man who had not slept well.
“It was not an easy night,” he said.
There have been many such nights over the last six years, but Monday had been particularly bad, knowing dawn would deliver the anniversary of the date that painted the sadness in his eyes.
He had been a volunteer emergency medical technician six years earlier, working at a job site in Manhattan near the World Trade Center.
“I was looking up at the second plane that hit the tower just like I’m looking at you,” he said, staring intently at his interviewer.
His immediate response was to start looking for the injured and to help.
We spoke in the lobby of the Sacramento Convention Center, where Graham was an honored guest of more than 1,000 union nurses. Later in the day, he would speak at a rally on the Capitol lawn.
His message: America’s healthcare system is such a mess it has failed even those whose illnesses spring from patriotic heroism.
Oct. 10, 2001, Graham was diagnosed with asthma and “five or six other” respiratory ailments. Since, he says, “It’s gotten progressively worse.” He quit his job as a safety officer for the Carpenters’ Union in 2004 after having battled pneumonia three times in a year.
His health insurance ran out a year later. These days, he’s got an oxygen tank and other paraphernalia at home. “When I have an asthma attack, I give myself my own emergency respiratory treatment.”
Graham’s story may by now sound familiar. He was featured in Michael Moore’s film, “Sicko,” and has become a crusader for universal healthcare.
“There are 18,000 people dying every year in the United States because they don’t have healthcare,” he says. “That’s six 9/11’s a year.”
Listening to Graham’s story is an uncomfortable experience. The Nurses Association knows that; it’s why it brought him to California at a time when legislators and Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger are negotiating health insurance reform the nurses believe falls short of an authentic solution.
Alone among interest groups in Sacramento, the California Nurses Association opposes any healthcare reform that falls short of blowing up the private insurance-based system and replacing it with a Medicare-style system in which everyone would be insured by the government.
It’s not this union’s style to play nice or to compromise. Whether it’s organizing, negotiating, advocating for patients’ rights or fighting for political change, the CNA engages in what it calls “intelligent, focused, strategic militancy.”
Judging from the results of late, it’s hard to argue with the strategy.
The CNA has grown from 18,000 members in 1992 to 75,000 today. It has become a national force in recent years, picking up bargaining units in Illinois and Maine, and adding to its name: It’s now the California Nurses Association/National Nurses Organizing Committee.
Earlier this year, it affiliated with the AFL-CIO — an action that was not coincidentally followed by the national union’s decision to make healthcare its top priority in the 2008 election year.
MSNBC last year named CNA Executive Director Rose Ann DeMoro to its list of the “10 most influential women in America,” alongside such heavyweights as Hillary Clinton, Condoleezza Rice and Nancy Pelosi.
In the political arena, the CNA in 2004 hound Schwarzenegger to such distraction, he famously blurted that line about “kicking their butts.” Nurse protesters continued to disrupt every Schwarzenegger fundraiser in 2005, and if they weren’t solely responsible for defeating his special-election ballot measures, they certainly softened him up.
Polling at the time showed that nurses, by virtue of their profession and reputation, had more credibility with voters than any other group.
These days, it’s Democratic Assembly Speaker Fabian NuĆĀ±ez who’s feeling the heat. Nurses denounce his compromises on healthcare reform as a sellout, and assert he’s become way too friendly with Schwarzenegger.
To look at those at the union convention and listen to their speeches is an exercise in cognitive dissonance. The women on the stage are gentile and grandmotherly, but their rhetoric is steely and defiant.
They say they won’t rest until California has a single-payer, universal healthcare system in place. Believe that.
Not this year, probably not next and maybe not the year after, but eventually there will be a showdown in this state over the issue. The nurses may not win, but you can be certain of this: They’ll make their opponents very uncomfortable.
— Timm Herdt is chief of The Star’s state bureau. His e-mail address is therdt@VenturaCountyStar.com.
