With Max Baucus' Senate Finance Committee continuing to shut out the voices of single payer advocates while rolling out the red carpet for the insurance giants and other health care corporations, five more were arrested today and dozens of other nurses stood before the committee in a dramatic silent protest.

Today's action -- the second in a week that led to 8 arrests -- coincided with the anniversary of the birth of Nightingale. It also marked the kickoff of two days of actions by nurses from around the country who are pressing for a legislative agenda for quality nursing care and a single standard of quality care for all.

Here's AP.  Here's a link to a photo of the nurses being arrested.  The Wash Times covers it here and here's Patricia Murphy.

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After years of shredding our public health infrastructure and ill advised minimal preparations for the next great global pandemic, the spreading swine flu threat is at last making clear the very real calamity that could be just around the corner. If not today, surely from the next epidemic.

The Obama administration's call on Congress Tuesday to allocate $1.5 billion for combating the virus is a start, but only a start. The RNs of the National Nurses Organizing Committee and California Nurses Association (NNOC/CNA) believe that far more is needed in federal action, in regulatory crackdown on insurance practices that potentially inhibit those who are infected from seeking help, and in global coordination.

From SARS to avian flu to the swine influenza, the only question has not been if, but when.

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In Canada, it took the dogged determination of one province, Saskatchewan, and a visionary leader Tommy Douglas, to pave the path to a national health care system, which they call Medicare.

For all the detractors of the Canadian system in the studios of Fox News and the board rooms of rightwing think tanks, consider this one note: In 2004, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation conducted a national poll to select the greatest Canadian of all time. The winner in a landslide -- Tommy Douglas.  

While the federal window remains open for reform, with two national single payer bills, John Conyers' HR 676 in the House and now Bernie Sanders'  S 703 in the Senate, many nurses, doctors, and health activists are turning to the states to lead as well.

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With the final White House Forum on healthcare scheduled Monday, April 6 in downtown Los Angeles, advocates of single payer/guaranteed healthcare have one more opportunity to shake up what has become a dreary conventional wisdom about the presumed acceptable parameters of the debate.

Hundreds of nurses, doctors, healthcare and labor activists will rally at 9 a.m. outside the California Endowment, 1000 North Alameda St., Los Angeles.

It will mark the fifth time, at all five White House regional forums, that the single payer/Medicare for all message will come to the stage, outside and inside the forum.  You can extend that to the town hall meeting at the White House last week where the President was asked why we can't have a national healthcare system like they have in other industrialized nations.

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Haven't we heard this song before? It sure looks like the people who already control our healthcare system are framing the biggest issues of the present healthcare reform debate.

From the back rooms to the committee hearings to the White House summits to the front pages of the newspapers, the demands of the insurance industry are given enormous deference and accommodation.

Is it fear of Harry and Louise, the insurance campaign that some believe torpedoed the muddled Clinton health proposal? Is it the considerable influence of insurance industry contributions in the pockets of many legislators?

Or perhaps it's the caution or lack of will of some liberal groups to press for more fundamental reform--such as a single payer/expanded Medicare for all approach--that permits the industry and its conservative champions in Congress to dominate the terrain.

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