[1]NNU - Medicare for All!



Earlier today, one of our nurses spoke on her direct experience with our
broken health care system at the Primary Health and Retirement Security
Subcommittee for the U.S. Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions
(HELP) Committee field hearing hosted by Sen. Ed Markey in Boston,
Massachusetts.

Hannah Drummond is a registered nurse, National Nurses Organizing
Committee/National Nurses United member, and the Chief Nurse
Representative at Mission Hospital in Asheville, North Carolina.

As a witness at this hearing, Hannah provided testimony on the ways
corporate greed endangers patient care and health care workers, something
she has direct experience with as an employee of HCA Healthcare — the
largest for-profit health care system in the country.

With more than a decade of nursing experience, Hannah entered the field to
heal people and provide quality care to her community. She originally
joined Mission Hospital because of its reputation for excellent care, but
after her entire hospital system was bought out by HCA, that quickly
changed.

“At my hospital, we’ve seen firsthand how a corporate behemoth like HCA
prioritizes greedy business practices that endanger patients and workers.
When HCA took over Mission Hospital in 2019, nurses were worried about
what it would mean for our patients. Our concerns have been validated, as
HCA has had a massive and negative impact on our hospital, turning it from
a beacon in our community to a cautionary tale about corporate buyouts and
management.”

Hannah went on to describe a decline in the quality of medical supplies,
cutting staff and short-staffing registered nurses to unsafe levels, lack
of appropriate and properly fitting PPE, multiple department closures, and
a lack of sterile, safe equipment for surgery.

All of this contributed to dangerous working conditions for nurses and
other health care workers, and resulted in patients’ “higher risk of
preventable medical errors, avoidable complications, falls and injuries,
and death.”

This isn’t just happening at Hannah’s hospital: it’s taking place
throughout HCA’s nationwide network as well as at other health care
networks in communities across the country.

That’s because, as Hannah told Sen. Markey, “Our profit-driven health care
system is broken. Nurses know that you cannot serve the interests of
profits and patients at the same time. Health care should not be a
business. That’s why nurses across this country support a single-payer
Medicare for All system that will transform our profit-driven health care
system into one that prioritizes patient care.”

Together, that’s exactly what our nurses and supporters are working
toward.

[ [link removed] ]Check out more details from Hannah’s testimony by reading and sharing
this social media thread about today’s Senate HELP Committee hearing to
spread the word.

SHARE

We are so grateful to Hannah and all the nurses making their voices heard
and fighting for health care justice.

In solidarity,

Nurses’ Campaign to Win Medicare for All



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