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Kit Costello, Pres.
California Nurses
Association (CNA) |
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Our health care system is in a state of advanced meltdown," said Kit
Costello, president of the California Nurses Association (CNA). "And there’s
only one cure for what ails it, and that’s a single-payer health insurance system
with the same benefits for everybody," she added.
A militant union leader as well as a registered nurse with many years in
direct patient care, Costello serves as co-chair of the Labor Party’s Interim
National Council.
The CNA leader pointed out that management attacks on nurses’ working
conditions are also an assault on patients.
Due to HMO and Medicare rules, she said, hospitals make money through
quick discharges or by not admitting patients.
The hospitals’ drive for profits has led to a re-engineering of
patient care, Costello said. "They unilaterally redefined the skill level needed to
perform complex care and substituted cheaper workers while increasing the number of
patients that RNs were responsible for.
"So if you’re sick enough to be admitted to a hospital today,
you won’t have the same attention that you would have had five years ago, and
that’s just a fact," Costello said.
Hospitals have gone on a downsizing binge, replacing nurses and other
skilled workers with lower-paid, lower-skilled workers, the CNA leader reported. Nurses
face speed-up, which brings the constant worry of error.
"For nurses it’s really been a painful lesson that we, too, are
part of an insecure working class," Costello said. "So we’re gradually
becoming very united in our insecurity."
The CNA was forced to fight an 18-month war with the Kaiser health care
group to defeat massive wage and benefit takeaways, a war the nurses’ union won
through a public campaign and a series of brief strikes, Costello said.
A ballot question initiated by CNA helped shift the terms of the debate,
Costello suggested. The legislation would have taxed health care profits and put the money
back into the public health system and outlawed certain compensation arrangements that
cause HMOs and physicians to deny care.
The CNA’s "Patient Watch" campaign helps to expose how
industry greed leads to denial of care and dangerous staffing levels in hospitals,
Costello said.
Great fortunes are being made through health industry mergers while nurses
are downsized, doctors told how to practice and patients denied care, Costello said. The
money is there to deliver quality health care to all Americans, she stressed.
"Only a political movement led by trade unions and working people can
get us a health care system that treats us all with equal compassion," Costello
declared. That means a Labor Party, organized as methodically as our unions. "If not
us, then I don’t know who else," the nurses’ leader said.
