By: Health Insurance
Submitted: 2009-09-12 09:51:36 | Word Count: 781
he morning after addressing Congress, President Barack Obama seemed energized as he met a UPMC Shadyside oncology nurse whose tale he was using as part of a call for nurses' support in the health care debate.
Theresa Brown described the president as "ebullient" as he embarked on an aggressive push yesterday to build on his speech to swing the health care reform debate and prod Congress to pass a bill to provide universal health insurance.
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About 150 nurses gathered yesterday in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, including Ms. Brown and 17 nurses who drove down from Allegheny General Hospital on a day's notice.
Mr. Obama quoted from a blog post by Ms. Brown, who wrote about a patient who spent much of his dying months worrying about how to pay for his leukemia treatments.
"That's why we need health care reform," Mr. Obama said, quoting Ms. Brown.
It's too early to tell if Mr. Obama's prime-time speech halted the upsurge of criticism of his health reform plans. But Pittsburgh's nursing contingent expressed support for Mr. Obama's goals because uninsured patients strain hospitals' finances by leaving large unpaid bills.
Several of the nurses also support Mr. Obama's plans to bring additional Wcompetition to the insurance market through a health insurance exchange, in which the uninsured can choose from a menu of competing options.
Cathy Stoddart, a kidney transplant nurse at AGH, said that Highmark's near-monopoly on the Western Pennsylvania insurance market makes it difficult to negotiate.
"If there's competition, maybe our hospital won't have to fight for decent rates" of reimbursement, she said.
Ms. Stoddart, the policy and politics chair for the National Nurse Alliance, a part of the Service Employees International Union, got a call from the White House on Wednesday inviting her to bring a group down. She brought 15 union members and two managers from the hospital -- Judith Zedreck, chief nursing officer, and Angela Costa, who manages the neuro intensive care unit -- to show their support for health care reform.
Mr. Obama urged the nurses to keep pushing for universal health care yesterday morning, then continued a health care-heavy schedule with meetings with his Cabinet and 17 moderate Democratic senators, including Sen. Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania, to talk about the reform plans.
On Capitol Hill, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi called Mr. Obama's address "one of the greatest speeches ever delivered in the Congress of the United States." During her weekly news conference, she didn't set a timetable to consolidate the three versions of the health care bill that have passed out of committees and bring them to the floor.
Ms. Pelosi said House members want to see what's in the Senate Finance Committee bill -- scheduled to be unveiled next week -- before going ahead with legislation.
"But I'm confident the president will sign a bill this year," Ms. Pelosi added.
In a news conference of their own, Republican Whips Sen. Jon Kyl and Rep. Eric Cantor accused the president of being disingenuous with some of his claims about how to pay for his $900 billion plan and the potential for people to lose their current insurance, and urged more Republican input in the process.
According to a transcript provided by his office, Mr. Kyl said health reform legislation should be broken down into smaller proposals on specific issues such as tort reform and eliminating state boundaries in selling insurance policies.
Mr. Obama gave every indication that he will continue on the current path and will be campaigning hard on health care in the coming weeks. He asked the nurses to join the fight, which Ms. Stoddart said the SEIU was doing, in part, with a program in which patients, doctors, nurses and others write on scrubs to share their story.
Ms. Stoddart said the SEIU plans to send scrubs to all 535 members of Congress and ask them to wear them on the floor of their chambers to display their constituents' stories. She said there are tentative plans to have the scrubs displayed publicly in AGH so members of the community can contribute.
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