Health Care Reform

As Congress prepares to leave for its August recess, the health reform debate is sure to be hotter than ever. C. Stacy Beam has been a nurse for over 15 years with a background in both medical and psychiatric nursing. She holds a law degree from Northeastern University School of Law and is an adjunct professor of clinical psychiatric nursing at Northeastern University’s Boeve College of Health Sciences. She has a longstanding interest in national politics and women’s rights and can be found blogging over at her very fun website, Secretary Clinton. She wrote this post for the Women’s Media Center, where it was originally published.

If health care reform is enacted—and if it works to lower costs and keep Americans healthy—nurses will be a large part of the solution, argues the author. Trust her: she’s a nurse.

When President Barack Obama appeared in the Rose Garden on July 15, 2009, to continue to stress the urgent need for timely passage of health care reform, there was a reason he was flanked by some of the biggest names in nursing today. No other profession is more trusted than the nursing profession, at least according to Gallup’s Most Trusted Profession poll, which nursing has “won ” for seven consecutive years.

At the president’s side were, among others, Dr. Mary Wakefield, the administration’s highest ranking nurse, and Becky Patton, American Nurse’s Association president. The message was clear—for decades nurses have consistently advocated for affordable, quality, equitable distribution of health care services for all Americans. And while much of the health care debate has focused on major stakeholders such as physicians (largely via the AMA), the insurance and hospital industry, labor unions and to a much lesser extent, the health care consumer, it is nurses who can and will be an essential aspect of any health care legislation that seeks to provide cost-saving, quality care, particularly to America’s most vulnerable populations.

Nurses are in a unique position to attest to the consequences of how today’s current health care market has privileged expensive, acute treatments over more cost-saving models that focus on disease prevention, health education and screening. While much has been made of the plight of the country’s almost 50 million uninsured, less has been made of the growing number of under-insured people, who can no longer afford even their employer-based plans or find that their health care needs are not being met despite their current coverage.