Nurses fight back.

San Francisco, California 

A California emergency-care dispatcher received a call from a woman seeking immediate help because she was bleeding uncontrollably. He was flabbergasted to find that the call came from the local hospital. The woman had tried in vain to summon help with her call bell. In desperation she called 911.

More tragic is the story of a thirty-four-year-old mother who suffered persistent abdominal and pelvic pain and bleeding. Her health-maintenance organization repeatedly turned down her requests for referral to a specialist. Two years later she was dead of colon cancer.

These are just two of the horror stories cited by the California Nurses Association, which is spearheading a fight against today's health-care industry. The nurses' union blames "restructuring" for the dangerous cuts in patient care that have accompanied record profits for the health-care industry.

The California Nurses Association has joined forces with Harvey Rosenfield, author of an auto-insurance reform initiative adopted in California a few years ago. Together they are circulating petitions for the Patient Protection Act of 1996. The petition needs 700,000 signatures to qualify for the November 1996 state ballot. Consumer advocate Ralph Nader has called upon Californians to support the measure, calling it "the single most important health-care battle this year."

If voted into law, the sweeping measure would guarantee patients a right to safe care and require adequate staffing for all health-care facilities. It would prohibit HMOs and insurance companies from arbitrarily denying physician-recommended care. It would ban financial incentives to doctors who withhold health services. It would end gag rules that prevent doctors and nurses from telling patients about treatment options the HMO or insurance company does not want to pay for. It would establish an independent consumer-watchdog organization to assist patients. And it would set fees on large health-care corporations to help maintain emergency assistance, communicable-disease control, and services for seniors threatened with loss of Medicare benefits.

Hospitals and HMOs say they need to cut costs because they are losing money. But the California Nurses Association points out:

* Hospital-industry operating profits rose 17.8 percent consecutive year of a major increase;

* Health care was the nation's most profitable industry from 1989 through 1994;

* Chief executive officers of the seventy-one largest HMOs received an average compensation of $7 million in 1994.

Meanwhile, nurses are being laid off, staffing ratios are reduced to dangerous levels, and less expensive but poorly trained workers are assigned to patient care.

Throughout the health-care industry, all eyes are on California. For more information, contact Kit Costello, R.N., or Chuck Idleson at the California Nurses Association, 145 Market St., Ste. 1100, San Francisco, CA 94103, [phone].