463. California Nurses Demand Hearings, Changed Nurse-Patient Ratios for 2001

463.


Included in this library entry, a July 30, 2001 note from BCN editor to me. She writes that I was correct to wait a while to release that July morning’s Sausalito news story. She writes that other SF news outlets reported this news item too hurriedly; they were reporting events before the facts of the case were sufficiently clear to area law enforcement.

Lurene's email in 2014: lurenexyz@gmail.com

“Thanks. But you have put non-stop efforts into training me. I can not exactly take the credit,” I wrote to her on the office note.

It’s not usually necessary to answer quick office notes. I thought it was important here, though, to say her opinions about my work mattered, good or bad. I was corrected for errors on other occasions.

This post is led, however, by a brief, 7-paragraph, published news story for Bay City News by Lurene Helzer, August 23, 2001, “Nurses Demand Nurses-Patient Ratio Hearings Be Held In Multiple Locations.” The news brief is noticable only because it shows that health care in California was already quite strained in 2001.

I would fear work as a physician or nurse in California on this day, March 26, 2010. We are now seeing a new era in healthcare thanks to the relentless, back-breaking political work of U.S. President Barak Obama, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, thousands of others. Old friends I have from Europe and Canada were calling me late at night in February, 2010 to ask me about this issue as it was debated in the U.S.

Was the U.S. changing its financial spots for the first time in decades, they asked? Who are the American people, as a mass, deep down?  Why is this healthcare issue, for Americans, almost like a trip back to the Cold War or The Civil Rights Act of 1964? Who are you people?

In such conversations, I say: Healthcare is about money. Liberal or Conservative, Americans are religious-emotional about money. America is different than its European cousins in this respect and always will be. 

Photo of Sausalito houseboat from Wikipedia entry on Sausalito, Creative Commons, Oct. 2008.