WASHINGTON — A longtime Santa Barbara nurse before she joined Congress, Lois Capps, D-Santa Barbara, knows the story of uninsured Americans: Without preventative care, easily-detected ailments turn into expensive emergency room visits.
As Congress mulls a healthcare overhaul that would extend coverage to the nearly 50 million uninsured Americans, Capps has become a liaison between Washington and the nation’s 2.9 million nurses — the professionals who are on the front lines at hospitals, clinics and schools.
“I’ve waited my lifetime as a nurse for us to come to this moment in Congress,” said Capps, who joined Congress in 1998 and still maintains her credentials as a registered nurse.
Capps and other nurses joined President Barack Obama at the White House Rose Garden Wednesday afternoon to promote the reforms.
“Few understand why we have to pass reform as intimately as our nation’s nurses,” Obama said. “They see firsthand the heartbreaking costs of our healthcare crisis.”
Capps said nurses are on the front lines of delivering healthcare in America. “They will be central to any effort to make sure that all Americans have access to affordable, quality healthcare,” she said.
Right now, there’s a waiting list for nursing schools because of a shortage of nursing teachers, Capps said. The healthcare legislation would create more nursing faculty and also expand loan prepayment programs — two measures that would accelerate the ranks of qualified nurses.
Capps sits on the House’s Energy and Commerce Committee, which today begins a week of deliberation of the House Democrats’ version of the bill. The plan, unveiled Tuesday, would penalize businesses that don’t buy healthcare while providing a subsidy for individuals making less than $43,000 or families making less than $88,000.
But the extra care isn’t cheap. The price tag would be $1.04 trillion over 10 years, according to a preliminary analysis released Tuesday by the Congressional Budget Office.
The U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the world’s largest business lobby, blasted the legislation. In an open letter to members of Congress, the trade group said that the health reform legislation would devastate small businesses and negatively affect global trade.
The proposal would include a so-called “public option,” which President Obama says would increase competition and lower prices while “keeping insurance companies honest.”
Capps said the public option is the “heart of what we’re going to do to bring costs down.”
“Many people aren’t served well by an insurance plan or are denied care,” she said. “What we need to do to provide competition is to have a public plan,” she said.
But Republicans see the public option as a Trojan Horse for socializing medicine. Americans would be forced into the government-run plan, “giving Washington bureaucrats the power to ration healthcare,” according to the office of the Sen. Mike Enzi of Wyoming, the top Republican on the Senate health panel.
On Wednesday, that committee passed a Senate Democrats’ version of the bill, which must now go to the Senate Finance Committee.
Capps said that the public option, like existing private insurance policies, would be financially self-sufficient. “They all have to stand on their own,” she said.
The push for expanded healthcare comes amid a growing shortage of nurses. To meet healthcare demands, the United States needs to add 500,000 to 750,000 nurses by 2020, said Rebecca Patton, president of the American Nurses Association.
