Health Care/Tort Reform

WASHINGTON—Health care reform may be Priority No. 1 in Congress and at the White House, but for the 1,825 religious conservatives who gathered for the annual Values Voter Summit, the subject was barely on their radar screen.

“To me, there are so many more important issues than health care right now,” said John Leaman, a retired yacht builder from Lancaster, Pa. Added his wife Linda, a waitress: “I don’t think it’s as urgent as Obama’s making it out to be.” The real problem, she said, is illegal immigrants “cluttering up our emergency rooms.”
Jim Daly, president of Focus on the Family, speaks with Esther Fleece, director of Millennial Studies, at the 2009 Values Voter Summit in Washington. Health care reform was largely absent from the agenda and was not a factor in voters’ choices in a straw poll of possible 2012 GOP presidential candidates. (RNS PHOTO/Nick Kirkpatrick)

Indeed, among the dozen issues that summit participants cited in casting their votes in a straw poll for possible 2012 Republican presidential candidates, health care never made the list. The top three issues were abortion, protecting religious liberty and opposing same-sex marriage.

“It’s up to us to help each other; it’s not the government’s job to take care of us,” said Texan Karen Marsalis, a retired teacher from Deadwood, whose shirt, like her husband’s, featured stars and stripes and images of the Statue of Liberty.

Just days before the summit got underway, a report by the University of Akron and the liberal-leaning group Public Religion Research found that conservative and progressive activists don’t just disagree on hot-button issues on the public agenda, they can’t agree on the agenda itself.

Conservative activists—typified by the “values voters” who rallied in Washington— picked abortion (83 percent) and same-sex marriage (65 percent) as their top two issues; just 6 percent cited health care. Progressives, meanwhile, cited poverty (74 percent) and health care (67 percent).

The only organized attention that health care received at the two-day summit was a panel discussion on “ObamaCare: Rationing Your Life Away.”

Participants booed at any mention of “Obamacare,” and cheered Texas Gov. Rick Perry when he decried a government that “has its hands too far in our pockets and its nose too deep in our business.”

Many participants drew a distinction between access to health care and health care reform. Anyone who needs treatment, they said, can get the care they need. How they pay for it is their problem, no one else’s.

“Personal responsibility is not something people want to do anymore,” said Debbie Michael of Mount Airy, Md. “We expect the government to do it all.”

Still, some at the summit said there is room for improvement. Lorie Watson, a nurse from Simpsonville, S.C., works for an insurance company administrating third-party claims and worries about the high costs of drugs and tests. She said Washington could have “a limited role in reform, but not in providing health care.”

Gov. Rick Perry stopped at the coffee shop area in the Market Street at 50th and Indiana shortly after 4:30 p.m. Wednesday. Nearly 200 people waited to show their support for Perry who wants to stay Texas governor for a third term.

"People are going to decide by virtue of the policies we put in place. I've always been a believer in public policy makes good politics," says Perry. But Perry has some competition. Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison announced earlier this month she wanted to be the republican on the 2010 gubernatorial ballot.

Texas needs to lead, not secede, the state's governor told supporters during a Wednesday campaign stop in Lubbock.

Gov. Rick Perry shrugged off a lone shout for secession from the back of a crammed coffee shop as he ticked through the highlights of his gubernatorial career.

"My deal is, you know what? Let's just show the rest of the nation how to do it right," Perry said.

Perry told the crowd of more than 100 overflowing the small space that a stable state economy proved the value of state-level leadership as Washington Republicans behaved like Democrats.

"Hogwash, I mean that's just hogwash," Perry said of federal Republicans voting in support of bailout funds.

As our first lady - or as I often refer to my wife, Anita, our "first nurse" (she received her nursing degree from West Texas State University) - will tell you, nursing is a fantastic and vastly rewarding career that touches almost every family in Texas, and many candidates are eager to undergo the education necessary to join their ranks.

Yet Texas faces a continued shortage of nurses that will get worse without additional, decisive action.

What's the problem? Most pressing is a continuing demand for instructors at nursing schools. In 2008, Texas schools of nursing had to turn away 42 percent of interested, qualified applicants. That's close to 9,000 capable Texans sitting on the sidelines instead of getting the training they need to start easing the burden on strained staffs and ailing patients.

Nursing schools say they'll need 265 full-time and 159 part-time faculty members, along with 93 clinical assistants, to increase enrollment by 20 percent. And all this is unfolding amidst reports that demand for nurses is expected to increase by 86 percent by 2020.

Fortunately, Texas isn't the kind of state that waits around for someone else to solve our problems. Eight years ago we began taking deliberate steps to alleviate the worst of this crisis by creating the Professional Nursing Shortage Reduction Program and the Nursing Innovation Grant Program. In 2007, the Hospital-Based Nursing Education Partnership Grant Program was established to expand the state's education capacity through partnerships between academic institutions and hospitals.

Over the years, these programs have combined to make a significant difference. In fact, in 2008, Texas nursing schools produced 7,689 new registered nurses, representing a 69.7 percent increase over the number of nurses who graduated in 2001.

We're improving, but we cannot afford to rest on our laurels in the face of an aging population and nursing schools that struggle to find and fund sufficient faculty.