While politicians in Washington debate how much more they can cut from Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security and other basic needs, far too many people continue to fall through the growing cracks on Main Street USA.
Nurses across the country are witnessing the fallout from the economic calamity that still plagues our communities. We see it in our patients, their families, and our own, in broad declines in health and living standards that are directly linked to low wages or lost jobs, lack of health coverage or skyrocketing out of pocket health costs, home foreclosures, and hunger.
Stories like this from Mick of Denver, sent to National Nurses United:
“I was working three years ago and got laid off and have worked on and off for 5 to 6 months since. Luckily, my wife is an Operating Room nurse and has carried me while I’m trying to retool and start something new, maybe.
“I’m 60 and although still fit to work I’m too old, too experienced, too informed and too righteously indignant when trying to get in the job fair queue. I have sent dozens of resumes out and applied to hundreds of online sites, with no nibbles.
“We’re a family of five and it’s tough to keep paring down the budget. Our health care costs, even with insurance, have gone up by about a third since 2000 and what really hurts is when something is not a covered procedure and we have to wait to go to a doctor or dentist. When it’s our kids, it hurts even more.
“We’ve put off many things, like getting my eyes checked, my teeth cleaned and checked, and that’s with my selling tools I would use if I were working, and telling one son that we can’t help him with college so he’s going to have to take a leave, at least until I can get back to work.”
Mick is hardly alone. Nurses see how the meltdown is eroding now just living conditions, but health. We see more stress-induced heart ailments in younger patients, especially in men in their 40s, hypertension, pancreatitis, now often affecting children who have high fat diets because that’s all their families can afford, gut disorders like colitis, and higher asthma rates with deaths now being reported due to income-related delays in obtaining care.
As a nation, we can no longer boast to lead the world. A mid-June study by the University of Washington’s Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation found life expectancies, relative to other developed nations, fell in more than 80 percent of U.S. counties from 2000 to 2007, even before the 2008 recession hit. American women are especially affected. In 40 percent of U.S. counties, life expectancy for women fell five years behind countries that fared better.
This is occurring in large part because of wealth upwards to those who need it the least. Witness a report from late June by Northeastern University economists. From June 2009 through the end of last year, corporate profits captured 88 percent of the growth in real national income compared to just 1 percent for aggregate wages and salaries.
People like Mick are asking why there is not more balance. “There has to be a give somewhere. Let the ‘gall’ streeters (Wall Street) know we have a revenue (not deficit) problem and that they may rue the day they have to answer to the American people for the crimes they’ve committed by shirking their responsibilities to our country,” he writes.
America’s nurses have identified an alternative to endless demands for more cuts. Those who created the economic catastrophe, the financiers and speculators on Wall Street, should be held accountable and pay their fair share.
Our proposal is a sales tax on major Wall Street speculation, the major transactions on dividends, credit default swaps, stocks, bonds, futures, the very fiscal wheeling and dealing that left Main Street families shattered and in pain.
More than 15 other nations have such a tax, which could raise hundreds of billions of dollars every year.
We’d like to hear how the economic debacle is affecting you and your family too. Please let us know at where you can share your story or read others, and we hope you’ll join our campaign for new national priorities, and a tax on Wall Street to rebuild our nation.
Deborah Burger is a registered nurse and a co-president of the National Nurses United, the nation’s largest union and professional association of registered nurses.
EDITOR’S NOTE: This is an online-only column and has not been edited.
