Earlier today, ANA submitted a letter from President Pamela F. Cipriano, PhD, RN, FAAN to Congressional leaders detailing our concerns over the House healthcare reform legislation introduced earlier this week. The letter details the bills shortcomings and expresses our opposition to the legislation in its current form.
ANA has serious concerns with a number of the bill’s key provisions that seek to do the following:
- Replace pre-existing condition discrimination protections with continuous coverage buy-in penalties
- Wind-down Medicaid expansion and fundamentally shift the program to a per-capita block grant funding structure for states
- Eliminate the Prevention and Public Health Fund
- Restrict access to women’s health services
- Repeal income-based subsidies in exchange for age-based tax credits
We’ll continue to closely monitor developments around healthcare reform, and urge you to continue to following Capitol Beat and our RN Action twitter account for the updates.
I agree with ANA’s Opposition statements and letter sent. I would like to add other comments.
The congress for many years, solution to funding programs such as this was to slash or discontinue other programs with no regard to their efficacy and outcomes when discontinued. They have not addressed the cost of this program. If I recall, correctly we are the wealthiest nation in the world yet we are the only country among our contemporaries not to have health care coverage for all our citizens. That is unbelievable. The financing for all our programs that benefit all our citizens should come from the taxes we pay to the federal government. However, in this country it seems that wealthy people, such as our current President, do not have to pay taxes if they lose a large amount of money for whatever reason this is allowed and so paying our due amount of taxes falls on those of us who do not have such types of deductions. If everyone, no matter what their income, paid their fair share of taxes, based on their income, to support the infrastructure needs of our government, we probably would not have these problems
Sending these programs out to the states in block grants, or whatever, will NOT INSURE that people will be given what they need. This should be a federal program so that all who are in need of these services are treated equally.
Our President’s theme has been “Make America Great Again” We are Great but we need to make America great for all the people in our country, not just the few.
Additionally, while Congress talks about the cost for the program. they have not addressed the issues that lack of health care insurance has for the future. When people have access to primary health care services for the diagnosis and treatment of chronic conditions and/or the prevention of these conditions to begin with, they are decreasing the cost for the treatment of complications incurred by these chronic conditions later (increased ED use, increased hospital admissions for more complicated treatment of these conditions. We need to have universal health care for all our citizens so that we can have a healthier country, a healthy workforce, a healthy pediatric population both physically and developmentally Health care does not occur in a vacuum. Lack of appropriate health care is integral to many of the problems we have today, ie: children who cannot read at grade level by 3rd grade (brain growth and development begins when you are born and is dependent on stimulation so that the brain can grow and have all the tools necessary to be great in school). Health Care and having programs that help parents understand ,ie the importance of reading to their children from birth on, talking to them, pointing out things all leads to healthy brain growth and will be the main reason they will be great in school. Health care intertwines with many other societal problems, ie. drug dealers who set up shop on street corners where parents do not feel safe letting their children out to play, inadequate housing, lack of food (children actually go to bed hungry in tis country). There are many more parts to this but adequate health care for people of all ages is critical to all other societal issues we deal with. Adequate health care should be a right of citizenship not a special right for some. And yes, Mr. President, health care is complicated so please do not make it less than we have had with the AFC or Obama Care. Voters who elected you and cried do away with Obama Care may not have realized they were asking you to do away with the ACA but now they do and they are rising up about it so LISTEN and act appropriately for all in this country. Focus on what YOU can do for the citizens of our country, not the political benefits for your party by repealing and replacing without truly knowing what the outcomes will be and what the consequences will be.