They didn't give women the vote, and they aren't going to give us single payer, we're going to have to fight for it, asserted Rose Ann DeMoro, at a D.C. press conference (in the video clip below). DeMoro vowed that the fight will continue and nurses across the country are about to turn up the heat. And no one needs the heat quite as much as President Obama:
"Obama is really the one who is puzzling to us," said Rose Ann DeMoro, executive director of the California Nurses Association, a union that has been leading many of the single-payer protests. "We were all supporters of him. . . . It's hard to understand how he can expect to rally support around a plan that will leave the big insurance companies in charge and keep hurting patients."
Kudos to nurses for leading the fight for single payer! And it's not just California nurses -- it's a national nurses movement for single payer. All registered nurses organizations support single payer, according to California Nurses Association/National Nurses Organizing Committee Executive Director, Rose Ann DeMoro.
"There's a Conspiracy of Silence Against Single Payer."
Rose Ann DeMoro, executive director of the California Nurses Association/National Nurses Organizing Committee, told Baucus, "there is a groundswell" across the country that will continue to press for single payer reform, and Baucus and other policy makers in Washington "are going to get to know us very well." In a later press conference, DeMoro blasted the conventional wisdom that single payer is not politically viable. "Is it politically viable to let people die and suffer from a lack of political will?" Noting the fight for women’s suffrage and the civil rights movement, she emphasized, "we’re going to have to turn up the heat. Women did not get the right to vote by voting on it." -- Inside the Baucus Single-Payer Meeting--What Was Said, What's Next -- by National Nurses Movement via dkos
Photo via American Journal of Nursing: Some nurse activists, along with like-minded physicians, celebrated National Nurses Week by getting arrested at a Senate Finance Committee meeting on health care reform. They were protesting the meeting’s lack of representation for those who support a single-payer health care system.
"I made a mistake. I should have left it (single payer) on the table, front and center with everything else."
Feminist Politics Single Payer Gender News Health Care Reform Rose Ann DeMoro Baucus
