Like many Americans, I am still trying to wrap my mind around the shifts and changes wrought in our country on November 4, 2008. We will all be at it a while, I think. One dimension haunts me as a nurse: we elected a president who calmly stated “I think health care is a right”.

As a young nurse I repeatedly tried to understand why education, fundamental K-12, was considered a given in this country, yet health care was something one not only had to negotiate for but indeed was being systematically subjected to the vagaries of markets, profit motives, shareholder demands, and the overt “rankism” of our society.

Working in the back wards of state psychiatric hospitals, I could not understand why these humans, the most vulnerable of our vulnerable populations, with few if any advocates, could be so summarily dismissed. Then the Reagan revolution moved these broken and fragile humans to new venues: prisons and homeless shelters. There was a shame associated with all of that for me. How could this country do this?

Then came the 90s with the abandonment of health care reform coupled with horrendous downsizing, reengineering, corporatization, and health care for profit. Drug companies and insurance companies became exemplars of great investments on the dollar. Not only was health care not a right; withholding it from people became a fiscally sound corporate decision. Now psychiatric patients were given 30 days to get well…or else, and this only for those with insurance. Clearly, this was not evidence-based practice! The numbers of the uninsured soared. To a high degree, the clinician voice was silenced as the fiscal officer’s voice gained volume.

We are all, I suspect, projecting our hopes and dreams on one man and his potential for leadership. I know it is neither fair nor realistic. Nonetheless, I harbor this small voice of hope that perhaps now we will reopen the dialog on health care as a right, will ask what kind of a country we want to be, how we hope to care for our vulnerable populations, whether we really think health care for profit is a wise decision, and maybe, just maybe, we will rewrite the tired narrative of the past and reinvent ourselves.

This entry was posted on Monday, November 10th, 2008 at 10:37 am and is filed under Access, Consumer Health Care, Patients' Rights, Policy, Politics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.