Monthly Archive for February, 2008

“We cannot sit back and wait for the federal government to pass health-care reform or wait for the next president to do something about it. Our legislature has the responsibility to uncover exactly what funding streams, compromises and trade-offs are necessary for potential changes to be made,” says a letter to the editor in today’s Pittsburgh Post-Gazette by Tracy Lawless, the Pennsylvania state campaign director for Health Care for Health Care Workers.

Lawless noted that the recent Robert Wood Johnson Foundation grant (doc) to the Pennsylvania Health Access Network may “help create a mandate toward serious health-care reform for the uninsured and underinsured.”

Members of the Iowa CareGivers Association (ICA) lobbied their legislators on January 29, talking about the need for better pay, better benefits, and better training and education for Iowa’s direct-care workers.

The caregivers also asked their legislators about their personal experiences with caregiving, as part of a push by the ICA to collect and publish stories of legislators and others who have been, in the words of the ICA’s theme for 2008, “touched by a caregiver.”

“The value of that is, it forces legislators to think completely differently about direct-care workers,” says ICA Policy Director John Hale. “When they start to think about direct-care workers in terms of their own lives, it becomes real, not just one of the hundreds of issues they have to deal with every day. It becomes more of a priority.”

“Invest in the nursing-facility work force, those who provide the care and have the most influence on the results produced. Hire the best people, train them and treat them well. Reward them with a livable wage and great benefits. Involve them in planning and decision-making. Have enough staff on board to ensure that the safety and well-being of residents can be assured. Acknowledge the good work being done,” urges an op-ed in today’s Des Moines Register. John Hale, the policy director of the Iowa CareGivers Association and the point person for the PHI Health Care for Health Care Workers campaign in Iowa, co-authored the piece with ICA Executive Director Di Findley. The two wrote in response to an expose on the quality of care in Iowa’s nursing homes.

“One of the more troubling aspects of the reporting to date has been the information pertaining to the million-dollar chief-executive salaries, $400-per-hour director fees and the off-shore, for-profit insurance companies used by the not-for-profit sector,” wrote Hale. “It’s particularly troubling when contrasted with the $10.77 average hourly wage of the certified nursing assistants who provide most of the hands-on nursing-home care. A quarter of these caregivers have no health-insurance coverage.”

Last year, the PHI Health Care for Health Care Workers campaign in Pennsylvania amplified direct-care worker voices in the debate over health care reform by joining a new statewide coalition. That amplification got a boost today when the coalition received a major grant.

The Pennsylvania Health Access Network (PHAN) has been awarded a $750,000, three-year grant by the Robert Wood Johnson (RWJ) Foundation and Community Catalyst. The Consumer Voices for Coverage grant will provide technical and financial assistance to help PHAN create a robust advocacy network.

“There is tremendous momentum in the states for implementing effective health care reform,” says RWJ President and CEO Risa Lavizzo-Mourey in a PHAN press release (doc). “We know from experience that the voices of consumers – the men and women who work hard each day to support their families – are often the most effective in driving necessary change.”

PHAN works to protect high quality health insurance coverage for individuals and businesses, and to expand coverage to the uninsured. Its partners include PHI, the Philadelphia Unemployment Project (PUP)/Unemployment Information Center, Pennsylvania Health Law Project, the Consumer Health Coalition of Pittsburgh, the Lutheran Advocacy Ministry in Pennsylvania, the Service Employees International Union, the City of Philadelphia Office of Consumer Affairs, the Keystone Development Partnership, the Pennsylvania Budget and Policy Center, and the United Food and Commercial Workers, Local 1776.

PHAN says it will use the grant money “to promote change at the state and national level by mobilizing affected constituencies, including consumers, health care providers, business, labor, the faith community and the general public to press for a more accessible and affordable health care system.”

Included in that mobilization will be direct-care workers, their employers, and the people they assist. “This grant will allow the Health Care for Health Care Workers campaign to further our advocacy so that direct-care workers in Pennsylvania can get the health care coverage they need,” says Health Care for Health Care Workers Pennsylvania State Campaign Coordinator Tracy Lawless. “Working with our partners at PHAN will allow the direct-care workforce to have a voice at the larger, statewide advocacy table.”

An article in today’s Pittsburgh Post-Gazette provides an update on Governor Ed Rendell’s plans for Cover All Pennsylvanians (CAP).

The governor is proposing to fund CAP in part with money accumulated in a state fund that helps doctors pay their malpractice insurance costs. He has now said he will not approve the malpractice subsidies until lawmakers agree to fund CAP.

Direct-care workers can “serve as a face of uninsured women,” Tameshia Bridges of the PHI Health Care for Health Care Workers campaign told a roomful of health care reform advocates at a Families USA conference.

Bridges and Lisa Codispoti of the National Women’s Law Center paired up to present their January 26 workshop, Putting Women in the Picture: The Face of Women in the Health Care Crisis (pdf). “This was a good opportunity to partner with a national women’s organization to highlight how direct-care issues are really women’s issues,” says Bridges.

Attendees included “people from all over, from Oregon to Florida, most of them from state-based health care reform advocacy campaigns,” says Bridges. “They asked really good questions. I think we gave them a framework to look at how women are impacted by health care reforms.”

The presentation also led to an invitation to present on the same issue at the Raising Women’s Voices to be held this April by the Avery Institute for Social Change, MergerWatch, and the National Women’s Health Network.

The Iowa caucus may be over, but Iowa’s nursing assistants haven’t stopped asking the presidential candidates to acknowledge the importance of direct-care workers – and to offer them better health care coverage and other supports.

In a letter to the editor in the January 25 Des Moines Register, CNA Lin Salasberry and 10 colleagues refer to the letter they wrote in late December to presidential candidate Mike Huckabee, expressing “frustration and concern” about a comment he made about direct-care work on Larry King Live. They reiterate the points made in that letter, including “how low pay, lack of affordable health benefits and lack of respect contribute to a high level of turnover, and how that revolving door of workers leads to less care and less quality of care for Iowans.” The Huckabee campaign acknowledged receipt of the original letter, but no response has been received. “We hope that Huckabee and other candidates understand that there are more than 3 million professional caregivers in America who are concerned about his words and failure to respond,” the follow-up letter says.

In a commentary on the January 25 letter posted on the healthcare08 website, health care journalist Craig Stoltz noted: “The healthcare debate is often centered on more easily identified constituencies: the uninsured, doctors, insurance companies. But the millions of people who are working on the front lines of healthcare are rarely considered.

“Can caregivers earn a place at the table of healthcare reform?” Stoltz asked.