ANA Unveils Renewed Push for Systemic, Affordable Health Care Reform

[liberalnurse]

The ANA, American Nursing Association, is the only full-service professional organization representing the nation's 2.7 million registered nurses through its 54 constituent member nurses associations....


Nursing is pumping up her muscles to campaign for affordable health care. Who better than the "on-hand" practioner to speak up and fight. We come in numbers!


http://www.nursingworld.org/pressrel/2005/pr0613.htm

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'ANA's Health Care Agenda - 2005' reaffirms support for universal access to essential, quality health care services; inadequate supply of nurses cited as a critical flaw in the current health care system

Silver Spring, MD - Despite years of incremental, market-based approaches to reform, the health care system continues to be fragmented and costly, according to a report on health care reform by the American Nurses Association (ANA).

The report, ANA's Health Care Agenda - 2005, further reaffirms the association's 15 years of support for a restructured health care system that ensures universal access to a standard package of essential health care services through a single-payer mechanism, and lays out a comprehensive strategy for government, industry, consumers and health care providers to follow in achieving these goals.

ANA President Barbara Blakeney, MS, RN, hailed the report, which updates the 1991 report, Nursing's Agenda for Health Care Reform, as a "badly needed blueprint for change" for a health care system that remains in a state of crisis. "ANA believes that access to health care is a basic human right that should be guaranteed to everyone in our nation," Blakeney said. "But our current health care system is ailing, and ANA's Health Care Agenda - 2005 offers a remedy."

The report advises reshaping and redirecting the nation's health care system away from the overuse of expensive, technology-driven, acute, hospital-based services to a new model in which a balance is struck between high-tech treatment and community-based services that focus primarily on prevention.

"The solution is to invert the health care pyramid and focus more on primary care instead of more costly secondary and tertiary care," Blakeney said.

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[Warpy]

1. That sounds like the original HMO model

back in the good old days when doctors were the ones who started and ran the HMOs and they provided excellent care. You know, before the insurance giants decided to suck profit out of sick people.

Prevention words fine for a younger and healthier population. The problem is that as we age, we're going to get sick. It doesn't matter if we run 10 miles a day and live on roots and berries, if we're genetically programmed to get heart disease, that's what we're going to get. Lousy lifestyles just hurry the process by a few years.

What we need in this country is a single payer system so that we can afford care, prevention when we're young and treatment when the inevitable happens.

The one thing that needs to change with our system is getting the profit motive out of it. For profit systems are great at producing things. They fail miserably when it comes to producing services.

[HuckleB]

2. I'm happy to see this. Nominating for Greatest!

Thanks for sharing.

Salud.