The lying leadership of the American Nurses Association (ANA) and the lies that will be the ruin of us all!
They’re at it again, those prevaricating leaders of the ANA, misrepresenting their membership numbers and of course the media that seems more concerned with regurgitating a press release then actually fact checking what the ANA spoon feeds them and then writing their own story instead they are complicit in perpetuating the ANA’s lie. If not for the media aiding and abetting the ANA in their fabrication, the ANA would have long ago stopped their prevaricating ways (or at least some of them) and not pretend that they represent the interest of nurses that aren’t even members of their organization.
President Obama (a man, I think, that’s never met a misstatement that he hasn’t liked) stands before the American people and tells us that his “plan” for health care reform which is not even his own (the plan actually belongs to Congress and in particular the Democratic-controlled Congress) has the backing of the nurses, as if all 2.9 million of us have held a convention and come to an agreement on his “vision” and we’re unanimous about our support of his “plan” when we are far from an agreement on his or any other plan being floated out there. What he means to say is that the ANA, a nursing organization that reportedly represents somewhere between 180,000 to 190,000 thousand RNs out of the almost 3 million RNs that are active in this country, is behind him when the reality is that just a little over 15% (and that’s assuming that all of the ANA’s members agree) of America’s RNs are behind him and his efforts when he refers to the support of the nurses and the ANA.
All the while they’re in their white lab coats and scrubs in neat little lines behind the President using the illusion of the organization’s large membership to provide him with credibility, just like the American Medical Association right before their membership blew the lid off of their charade of being the voice of the American doctor; and yet few have questioned the validity of the ANA’s claim of representing the interest of 2.9 million RNs. What’s truly ironic is that a membership of nearly 200,000 is a respectable number by nearly any standard, especially for nurses who can be as hard as herding cats when it comes to getting them to join a group. But no the nursing leadership of the ANA can’t help themselves and they have to pretend that they represent all of “nursingdom”, and I know I’m not the only one who’s grown tired of their lies and misrepresentations.
In their latest press release they have the gall to open their press release citing the statistic that nurses, once again, are ranked as one of our nation’s most trusted professions, and yet they think nothing of misrepresenting the facts when it comes to their membership and it’s a slippery slope because as the saying goes little lie, big lie. The ANA doesn’t nor has it ever even come close to represent the interest of all of America’s RNs, they as a membership organization can only represent their members and unless you pay the ANA cold cash you’re not a member thus limiting their sphere of representation to those nurses who consent to be members of the ANA. But the ANA like the AMA has long held an over inflated sense of self-worth and this has caused them to misrepresent their membership base just so they can have a seat at the table. It’s time for the ANA to come clean and cite their actual membership numbers and leave the rest of the 2,710,000 of us alone because we didn’t appoint them our spokesperson or spokes organization.
