Following the adjournment of the President’s Deficit Commission, National Nurses United, the nation’s largest professional nurses’ union, called on Congress to fully scrap the deeply flawed recommendations of the panel’s co-chairs, and move forward with the urgent actions that will protect America’s nurses and working families.Such a plan would start with a new economic program to put people back to work, a point made more pressing by today’s latest disastrous employment numbers, extending benefits for the unemployed which puts immediate money into the economy, and genuinely cutting healthcare costs, by expanding Medicare to cover all Americans.“We need a plan for everyone, not just Wall Street, the banks, and their champions in Washington who seem to dominate the political debate,” said Deborah Burger, RN, co-chair of the 160,000-member NNU. “Congress and the White House should stop focusing on the agenda of Wall Street and financiers which mischaracterizes causes of the deficit – the Bush tax cuts, the endless wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the downturn in the economy – and advance the programs Americans need, such as stimulus spending.”“Nurses know that the ongoing explosion in healthcare costs is also a major source of the federal deficit, and the insecurity faced by millions of American families and patients,” said Burger. She noted a Los Angeles Times report today showing that costs of employer-sponsored health insurance has ballooned nearly 34 percent the past six years nationally, far surpassing income for most families.“Yet the health plan passed by Congress does little to solve this problem. Read more…