My mother died in a  hospice care in San Diego.  My grandmother was a nurse in an Oakland Hospital.  I  cannot afford adequate health insurance in California, or most of the rest of our United States, for that matter.  My  awareness and appreciation of  the “Healthcare Not Warfare” campaign launched by the Progressive Democrats of America over this last year has helped shape the kind of activism that truly speaks to my heart.

In a presidential election year, especially this one, when the sheer urgency of the moment begs to grab all the attention,  my activist friends and I  are scattered thin, literally and figuratively.  We each have pet causes; America’s troubles are too numerous even for full time loudmouths to give voice!

My own personal favorites over the last eight years of a Neo-con Bush administration have been election integrity and  corporate media reform, both equally hungry issues soon to be yanking on the Obama chain.   I will be among the hordes of citizens waiting to make these issues important to our new president.

But I  am also selfishly, passionately driven to make this slogan and its campaign leaders in the Progressive Democrats of America to help in every way possible to make  “Healthcare Not Warfare” a priority on the first hundred days agenda. I am in good company, too.   The  powerful CNA, California Nurses’  Association and several other teamsters unions  have joined together with  PDA (pdamerica.org) to  create a groundswell of  momentum to help shape  President Obama’s  universal healthcare plan.

Currently,  his platform does not include  the all important single payer  clause, so the big pharma and big insurance  corporate cabal would still  be able to manipulate the insurance payout matrix.   Single payer simply means that we as individuals would be able to rely on a much simpler, more cost effective system like Medicare to handle claims and payouts and  even more significant, to lobby for competitive pricing from Big Pharma on our behalf.

When the California  nurses (who strengthened their union sufficiently enough to permanently  tarnish Governor Schwarzenegger’s claim to be a ‘friend of the service employee’)  decided to throw their fists in the air for single payer universal health insurance,  the issue gained  a feisty  ally.   The nurses had come out in massive numbers for movie theatre openings of Michael  Moore’s “Sicko”, handling out pamphlets explaining how single payer healthcare for every American was not a radical, left wing, socialist idea, but a reasonable, logical solution to one of  America’s  most shameful problems; we  are the ONLY industrialized nation on the planet with  an estimated fifty million  uninsured citizens.

National PDA Director Tim Carpenter tapped into this whirling dervish of  life in the balance caregivers and he has been marshalling his  nightingales toward DC ever since. Obama will soon feel the  wind  at his back  from a nation ready for  change.  Part of that change must include  making  Americans  feel a healthy pride in our country!  Universal, single payer healthcare will  help  do that.   Who better to give our pride a healthy glow, than an army of nurses with progressive human values  and  a concise, simple agenda for  a new president’s first hundred days?