HEALTH CARE WORKERS UNITE! In what seems like a fairly interesting initiative, SEIU is forming a health care union of 1 million members (with plans to expand to 9 million) to create a sort of unified force of health care workers able to coherently advocate and argue for change. "The creation of a national healthcare union will enable us to pool our resources, coordinate our strategies, and unite our strength like never before," said Dennis Rivera, chair of SEIU Healthcare. "Healthcare workers need to speak with one strong voice for quality care." Their first days will see "a new contest for healthcare workers to submit their ideas on how to fix America's broken healthcare system, called Best Thing Since Aspirin," a "petition drive to collect signatures supporting $50 billion in new funding for children's health insurance through reauthorization of the State Children's Health Insurance Program (SCHIP)," "a joint campaign of the United American Nurses and the Nurse Alliance of SEIU for safe staffing to improve the quality of care in our nation's hospitals." What'll this mean? Who knows? Possibly nothing. But those who've studied the history of health reform know how powerful the American Medical Association has, in the past, been, on blocking change. Those providing health care have a naturally unique storehouse of credibility on how to reform it. In recent years, the nurses have become deeply politically active, and a number of their associations have banded together to follow Michael Moore's movie around the country and use it as an organizing vehicle to advocate for national health care. They'll be in uniform, at theatres, with literature on reform and an open offer to answer any lingering questions. Their voices will now be amplified by million(s) of lower-tier health workers who, as the boomers age, will become more and more relevant, and listened-to, and numerous. Whether these groups will create momentum capable of anything in particular remains to be seen. But the creation of more countervailing forces to the medical industries and the AMA (which is itself increasingly split, and weakened) is interesting to watch. --Ezra Klein
