10.
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ANA Affiliation Threatens the Financial Viability of the MNA
The MNA currently gives $100,000 per month ($1.2 million per year) to the ANA at a time when the MNA is struggling financially to continue the work mandated by our membership to protect our members and deal with our state's health care crisis. The MNA is in the third year of a deficit budget. If we continue our affiliation, our deficit will grow, and we will be forced to either raise member dues (something our membership voted against last November), or dramatically cut services to our members.
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9.
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ANA Affiliation Threatens the Future of the MNA Union
In June, the ANA will make it mandatory that MNA join the United American Nurses, the ANA's national union. If MNA is forced to do so, every MNA union contract, and any future effort to organize nurses in our state will be placed at risk and open to legal challenges costing the organization thousands of dollars to combat. Our attorney, Alan McDonald, has strongly advised against participation in the UAN.
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8.
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The ANA Has Mismanaged Your Dues
($1.2 million annually from Massachusetts nurses). This is documented by the Lang Report, an independent audit of ANA's operations. According to the report, ANA will be bankrupt in 2 years. To cover for mismanagement, they want to dramatically increase your dues.
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7.
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The ANA is proposing a dramatic increase in members dues
At a time when the vast majority of the MNA membership has voted to end our relationship with ANA, the ANA intends, this June, to approve an additional dues increase. In June, the ANA intends to pass a $35 plus increase onto every MNA member ($25 this year, $10 the next, with an escalator clause that will automatically increase dues each year with no membership vote).
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6.
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The ANA has failed to adequately represent the progressive agenda called for by our membership in the current health care crisis
While the MNA was fighting the deskilling and substitution of nurses by unlicensed aides/techs, ANA literature suggested methods of working with such redesign initiatives and encouraged nurses to embrace change. When MNA was fighting managed care and market-driven health care, ANA endorsed managed care and market driven health care as viable and appropriate. When the Congress passed the Balanced Budget Act of 1997, the most devastating legislation to impact health care in our country in decades, the ANA issued a press release praising it as an important achievement.
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5.
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Staff nurses (the frontline caregivers who represent the majority of ANA members) will NEVER get voting seats at ANA in proportion to their overwhelming numbers
The voting ratio of the House of Delegates, the ANA governing body, is set up to keep it this way. The ANA has refused efforts to provide proportional representation to staff nurses. If there is no viable means to change ANA then why do we want to belong to ANA?
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4.
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ANA has failed as a national voice for nurses and nursing
Something is obviously wrong with an organization that professes to speak for the nation's nurses, yet after 100 years represents only 7% of the nursing population. ANA cannot be considered a national leader when its voice is a mere whisper in the national press. According to Madge Kaplan, a national health editor for WGBH, and confirmed by a recent Sigma Theta Tau report, nurses are essentially invisible in the national media.
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3.
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Massachusetts nurses must keep precious resources at home to protect themselves and their patients
Outside of California, Massachusetts has been hardest hit by health care corporatization and managed care. Tired and beaten by a "push down" system that demands more and gives less, too many nurses are leaving the profession. We need our resources to pass a safe staffing bill, to implement initiatives to address the nursing shortage and to work with coalitions in our state to create effective health care reform.
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2.
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Now independent from ANA, California's Nurses Association has the strongest voice for nurses of any state
Six years ago, they were the first state to suffer from the ravages of managed care. California nurses pleaded with ANA for help and got none. To survive, they disaffiliated. Now they have the best laws in the nation to protect staff nurses and patients, including newly-passed mandatory staffing ratios, effective January 1, 2002. California nurses did it and so can nurses in Massachusetts.
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1.
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Disaffiliation will allow us to form a national alliance with other like-minded progressive nursing organizations
The MNA has heard from many organizations, and many more nurses across the nation and across the world who share our progressive values and goals. Disaffiliation would allow us to build coalitions that can mobilize the 93% of the nursing population not represented by ANA.
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