For Immediate Release
Shum Preston 510-273-2276 or Liz Jacobs, 510-273-2232
New Healthcare Video Game Promotes Single-Payer Reforms
Healthcare's Not a Game—But It Can Be a Lottery
WASHINGTON - When American patients trust their health to a for-profit
insurance company, they're doing nothing less than gambling with
their lives. Registered nurses from the National Nurses
Organizing Committee and California Nurses Association today
announce the launch of a new healthcare video game, based on
this idea, called "You Bet Your Health." The game is part of a
wide-ranging public education and political mobilization
campaign for single-payer health reforms, which is the choice of
nurses and doctors.
The game can be viewed at www.YouBetYourHealth.com
This video game, which will be supported through online
advertising, features an everyday patient trying to win
healthcare from her insurance company. In each case, the
insurer wins. Finally, as a bonus round, the patient spins
to choose a healthcare system—and is fortunate to land on
the single-payer model, which is succeeding in much of the rest
of the industrialized world and which has been introduced in
Congress as HR 676 (Conyers - MI) and S 703 (Sanders - VT).
The ads follow up on a national campaign that has seen RNs
and MDs arrested before The Senate Finance Committee for
speaking out on behalf of the idea, as well as blog ads,
national television ads, and rallies outside each of the White
House Regional Forums on Healthcare. Each of these actions
has demanded that Congressional and administration leaders at
least consider, debate, and financially score the merits and
demerits of a single-payer system in relation to other proposals
as well as our current, multi-payer system.
"We all know the incredible financial and lobbying resources
that health insurance and pharmaceutical companies bring to the
table in Washington," said Deborah Burger, RN, co-president of
NNOC/CNA, "but Congress does itself and the nation a disservice
when it refuses to talk about the success of single-payer
healthcare. Nurses and doctors support single-payer
because it works."
A single-payer system, says NNOC/CNA, is the most effective
reform to assure universal coverage, choice of doctor, and real
cost controls that will end the financial and healthcare
insecurity faced by American families and American businesses.
Under a single-payer system, patients choose from among
competing doctors and hospitals, which are paid from a
universal, nonprofit health coverage fund, with no co-pays or
deductibles, real cost controls, and comprehensive benefits for
less than we and our employers pay now.
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National Nurses United, with close to 185,000 members in every state, is the largest union and professional association of registered nurses in US history.