"He's not heavy, he's our brother!" Nick Columbo and Why We Need California Health Care Reform

Pacificare's corporate offices had been flooded with phone calls protesting their decision for the past two days as word of the denial spread. When we arrived with our picket signs, we learned that Pacificare had reversed their decision late Monday evening and agreed to pay for Nick's radiation treatments. For that we're grateful, but no one should have to beg for medically necessary care and hold bake sales to pay for it.

How much more pain and suffering are we going to tolerate in this country? It doesn't have to be this way. We're the only industrialized nation in the world that doesn't have a guaranteed, single-payer health care system. The freedom to go to any doctor or any hospital. It's not a dream, it's legislation.

SB 840, authored by Senator Sheila Kuehl, and sponsored by the California Nurses Association was passed by the legislature in 2006. It was shamefully vetoed by Governor Schwarzenegger. He grew up healthy and strong in Austria, a country with a single-payer system. It's time that everyone living in America has the same opportunity.

Nurses hearts are broken every day when we see the devastating effects of our broken health care system. Patients are denied the care they need because of exclusions for pre-existing conditions. They're rationed out of the system by co-pays and high deductibles. The problem isn't Pacificare--it's every single insurance company. They make a profit by denying care to patients like Nick. That's why we need to replace them with the non-profit system that every other industrialized nation enjoys.

We don't need more insurance coverage. There's a lesson to be learned by every politician who thinks insurance companies are the solution. When else in the history of our country has a candidate for office proposed a mandate that requires that we purchase a defective product? We already pay more for care and we get less; a lower life expectancy and a higher infant mortality rate.

At the federal level we have legislation, HR 676, the bill John Conyers wrote for Congress. It's a form of expanded and improved Medicare for all, sometimes known as Single-Payer. Everybody in, nobody out. No exclusions based on ability to pay.

If you move, travel, or lose your job, your healthcare coverage always goes with you. There's no more administrative waste lost to insurance company paperwork. Patients and their doctors make decisions for care based on individual patient needs without interference from insurance company bean counters.

The Nataline Sarkysian and Nick Colombo families have insurance. Remember them the next time you think you do. And, remember them the next time you hear a candidate for president tell you about a mandate that will enrich the insurance companies. The tragedy of illness or injury shouldn't be compounded by financial ruin for families. Since when did taking care of each other become socialism?

As progressives in a humane society we've recognized that we're all in this together. May God Bless Nick Colombo. He's not heavy. He's our brother.

DeAnn McEwen has been a Registered Nurse in California for nearly 34 years. She is the Chair, of the Joint Nursing Practice Commission of the California Nurses Association and the National Nurses Organizing Committee. She works as an Intensive Care Unit nurse in Long Beach.