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Nurses for Reform

A British advocate for free-market health care reform made the case why the United States should not go the way of “Obamacare” at a small meeting Thursday with conservative-leaning writers.

Helen Evans, founder and chief executive officer of Nurses for Reform, said there was a “dialogue of the deaf” between the United States and Europe over their different styles of health care systems.

“There is no understanding of each other,” she said.

Miss Evans is embarking on an effort to introduce European nurses to the American media to talk about the failings of their socialized health care system. Someday, she would like to create a Nurses for Reform USA in order to bring American nurses to Europe to talk about the benefits of a free-market system and educate Europeans about the social programs the United States has, such as Medicare and Medicaid, which are often ignored across the pond.

“The Europeans think Americans are left to die in the street,” she said.

Miss Evans hopes the United States will not enact the types of health care reform promoted by President Obama because of the damage she said it would do abroad.

“If Obamacare comes in, it will be sold around the world as, look, the free market has failed in the United States,” she said. “And it will make it difficult to get good market reform in our own countries under way.”

She said she’d like to see the United States begin health care reform by making it easier for individuals to purchase their own health insurance instead of relying on their employers to provide it, among other things.

Gender-neutral

One of the Ivy League schools will soon offer gender-neutral housing to accommodate its undergraduate students who don’t feel comfortable in gender-separated dorms.

Gender-neutral housing was offered to graduate students at Princeton University beginning in the 2008-09 academic year, and officials agreed Thursday to expand the option to upper-class undergraduates beginning in the 2010-11 school year. In these designated apartment-style rooms, no more than four students of the same gender will be permitted to live together.

Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgendered Center Director Debbie Bazarsky told the Daily Princetonian in an e-mail: “This will have positive outcomes for transgender and genderqueer students as well as lesbian, gay, bisexual and heterosexual students. Princeton is behind most of its peer institutions in piloting this type of program, and I look forward to seeing how it works in its first year.”

Groups galore

A day after former State Department Deputy Liz Cheney launched the group Keep America Safe to highlight security issues, former Republican vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin announced that she too would be forming a group, one called Stand Up for Our Nation.

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