DES MOINES, Iowa, Dec. 10 /PRNewswire/ -- Print ads demanding health care reform are blanketing Iowa newspapers today. The California Nurses Association (CNA)/National Nurses Organizing Committee (NNOC) is running the ads as part of a national campaign pushing for guaranteed health care coverage for all Americans through a Medicare-based system.
The ad uses recent headlines about Vice-President Dick Cheney's heart procedure to point out the difference between the government-funded health care that the nation's leading politicians enjoy and the precarious health care situation in which most Americans find themselves.
A news article about Cheney's recent treatment for heartbeat irregularities provides the context with the headline: "If he were anyone else, he'd probably be dead by now." The text highlights that factors such as the patient's history and prognosis would likely lead to a denial of private insurance claims for most Americans, assuming that they had coverage in the first place.
CNA/NNOC has been critical of "universal health care" proposals by top Democratic presidential hopefuls Senator Hillary Clinton, Senator Barack Obama and John Edwards, which continue to rely upon the wasteful inclusion of private insurance companies.
"All Americans deserve the kind of care that our Vice-President, President and Congress already have, but none of the candidate proposals can give it to them," said Rose Ann DeMoro, Executive Director of CNA/NNOC and a vice-president of the AFL-CIO.
"All the current Democratic proposals keep the insurance companies at the apex of power and deny Americans the chance for guaranteed health care," she said, "and the Republican proposals are far worse."
Earlier in the campaign season, CNA/NNOC teamed up with Physicians for a National Health Program to air television ads during Democratic presidential debates in Iowa and New Hampshire. The three "Speechless" ads featured regular Americans describing the costs, burdens and financial pressures that the current health care system is putting on them to one of the leading democratic candidates. They then ask the candidate what she or he is doing about it. The camera then cut to a card board cut-out of candidates Clinton, Obama or Edwards, with a voice-over that says, "The longer nobody talks about single payer, guaranteed health care for everyone, the longer we are going to wait to get it."
SOURCE California Nurses Association
