Leadership Quote by Lois Capps

There is a particular kind of authority politics loves to borrow: the lived credential. When Lois Capps says, "And as a nurse, I know very well the importance, for example, of electronic medical records", she is doing two jobs at once. She is staking policy expertise in biography, and she is smoothing a technocratic subject into something that sounds like common sense.

The phrasing is carefully modest. "For example" and "electronic medical records" are almost comically bland on their face, but that blandness is the point: it frames a contentious arena (health IT, costs, privacy, interoperability, bureaucracy) as an obvious improvement any reasonable caregiver would endorse. She doesn't argue; she testifies. "I know very well" is a soft hammer, a preemptive rebuttal to skeptics who might paint electronic records as government overreach or expensive disruption. The nurse identity also signals proximity to patients rather than insurers, vendors, or administrators, translating an infrastructure debate into bedside consequences: fewer medication errors, faster coordination, less repeated testing.

The political context matters. Capps served during the long grind toward digitizing American healthcare, from early incentives to the post-ACA push for coordinated care. Invoking nursing is a way to launder policy through empathy while quietly asserting competence. It's also a subtle reminder that "modernization" isn't just a Silicon Valley fetish; in her framing, it's basic safety. The subtext is: trust me, I've seen what paper systems do when time, information, and lives are on the line.