Service Employee Union's Latest Attack on RNs Parrots McCain's Attack on Obama's H...( OAKLAND Calif. June 5 /- The Serv...),Health

OAKLAND, Calif., June 5 /PRNewswire/ -- The Service Employees International Union is embracing the campaign rhetoric of Sen. John McCain's attack on Sen. Barack Obama's healthcare plan as a bludgeon to attack the nation's leading organization of registered nurses, the California Nurses Association/National Nurses Organizing Committee noted today.

In a mailing to CNA/NNOC members this week, SEIU blasts CNA/NNOC for supporting a "government-run health care system." McCain has used almost identical language to disparage Obama's proposals for healthcare reform on an issue that will be a major focus of the fall campaign.

"By carelessly and cynically adopting the McCain language, SEIU is not only showing its contempt for the majority of Americans who have told pollsters that the government should guarantee healthcare for everyone as a solution to the healthcare crisis that has put so many of our families at risk.

"They are also giving aid, comfort, and ammunition to Sen. McCain whose own healthcare plan would be a disastrous continuation of the dismal and failed status quo," said CNA-NNOC co-president Malinda Markowitz, RN.

By using his language, SEIU is effectively "validating McCain's attack on Obama," she charged. "We can now expect that McCain will be able to quote SEIU as sharing his disgraceful attempts to subvert desperately needed efforts to transform our dysfunctional and broken healthcare system," she said.

SEIU's latest attack comes just days before a planned "mediation" session between SEIU and CNA/NNOC next week in Washington. But SEIU's tactics, said CNA/NNOC Executive Director Rose Ann DeMoro, "make success in this forum less likely."

SEIU, she said, "will be using the meeting as a staging ground to attempt to show Democratic Party officials that it wants to end its war on RNs, even while it is quoting McCain in its attacks on us."

What SEIU says it is proposing, she noted, is a "no-raid agreement," at
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