"CheneyCare" Campaign Gathers Steam

Banking on the success of their earlier Iowa ads, which declared that Dick Cheney would be dead if he were "anyone else" and didn't have the publicly-funded health care that our politicians get, the California Nurses Association (CNA) / National Nurses Organizing Committee (NNOC) has launched a new national campaign called "CheneyCare."

In a press release Friday, the group outlined plans for its new campaign, which started with eight New Hampshire papers on Friday and goes national on Monday, in both newspapers and political blogs.

The ad (.PDF) is very similar to the prior ad, but they have a new website, CheneyCare.org, and an online petition they want you to sign. As before the nurses are advocating HR 676, the National Health Insurance Act.

The petition will be given to the 2008 Presidential candidates and members of Congress. The full text is:

I want genuine healthcare reform that guarantees everyone has healthcare coverage, without prohibitive costs , and an end to insurance company denials of needed medical care.

I support HR 676, an expanded and improved Medicare for All. I want the same access to healthcare that Vice President Cheney and all members of Congress now receive.

With regards to the Democratic candidates' proposals on Universal Health Care, the press release says:

CNA/NNOC has been critical of "universal health care" proposals by top Democratic presidential hopefuls Senator Hillary Clinton, Senator Barack Obama and John Edwards, which continue to rely upon the wasteful inclusion of private insurance companies.

As I've said before, the United States is the only industrialized nation that does not have some form of universal health care, and that because of that we are near the bottom in terms of infant mortality (see link above).

As Martin Luther King, Jr. once said,

Of all the forms of inequality, injustice in health care is the most shocking and inhumane.

Do any of us deserve less than Cheney?