*Tonight on Bill Moyers Journal:
Thirty-four years later, we're no closer to health care for everyone, despite the number of Americans who need it. But now, some very determined people are taking up the fight for universal health care. They're nurses — who day in and day out — encounter the human consequences of a broken system. Here's our report, by Producer Peter Meryash and Correspondent Rick Karr.
RICK KARR:Let's consider a hypothetical cardiac patient: Male, sixty-seven years old, high-stress job, and a history of serious heart problems. And let's say, hypothetically, that he'll be changing jobs soon. Intensive care unit nurse Geri Jenkins says a patient like this might have a tough time getting new health insurance.
GERI JENKINS: He's had four major heart attacks. He's had a quadruple bypass. He's got an implantable defibrillator in his chest. He has atrial fibrillation. He gets cardio vertigo and his heart rhythm goes out of whack. He would be uninsurable for having a preexisting condition.
RICK KARR:That is, he'd be uninsurable if he were an average American. But this case actually isn't hypothetical: The patient is Richard Bruce "Dick" Cheney — the vice-president — and because he's a government employee, he can't be denied health insurance no matter how serious his heart condition is.
Last year, Cheney was rushed to the hospital with an irregular heartbeat — at least his fifth trip to the hospital since being in office — and the incident made national news....
RICK KARR:It also caught the attention of a union called the California Nurses Association — or CNA — whose members see a sharp contrast between what they call the "Cadillac healthcare" the Vice President gets as a government official and what's available to MOST Americans.
ROSE ANN DEMORO: Dick Cheney can have the choice of doctors. He can go to any hospital. He can have excellent standard of care. And he's alive today because of it. And there are a lot of people who aren't.
RICK KARR:Rose Ann DeMoro is executive director of the CNA. Under her leadership, the union launched an ad campaign that's designed to shock: It claims that if Cheney were just a regular American, he'd probably be dead by now. The ad has run in newspapers across the country and on the internet and it calls for radical change in the country's healthcare system so that everyone can have access to the kind of care that saved the Vice President's life.
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ROSE ANN DEMORO:If you look at healthcare in America, there is no healthcare system. There's a healthcare industry. That's major objective is profit-making. Which means not providing the patient all of the care that they need, discharging patients early, patients without insurance being treated differently than wealthy people, frankly. And that is the healthcare system in America. Those who can afford it get to live and those who can't suffer needlessly.
RICK KARR:It's a strong indictment, but it's backed up by the numbers: The US has more preventable deaths than any other industrialized nation. And in fact, more than twenty thousand Americans die needlessly every year, according to a recent report, because they don't have health insurance.
But the CNA's "CheneyCare" campaign isn't just about the uninsured. The union says that even those of us who do have insurance face potentially fatal problems with the system. That's because insurance companies, driven by profits, are the ones deciding which medical treatments are paid for — and which aren't.
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