While we talk about health care in this country

We ought to be paying attention to details like this.

Dozens of registered nurses convicted of crimes, including sex offenses and attempted murder, have remained fully licensed to practice in California for years before the state nursing board acted against them, a Times investigation found.

The newspaper, in a joint effort with the nonprofit investigative news organization ProPublica, found more than 115 recent cases in which the state didn’t seek to pull or restrict licenses until nurses racked up three or more criminal convictions. Twenty-four nurses had at least five.

In some cases, nurses with felony records continue to have spotless licenses — even while serving time behind bars.

Nurse Haydee Parungao sits in a federal prison in Danbury, Conn., serving a nearly five-year sentence after admitting in 2006 that she bilked Medicare out of more than $3 million.

In her guilty plea, Parungao confessed to billing for hundreds of visits to Southern California patients that she never made, charging for visits while she was out of the country and while she was gambling at Southern California casinos.

Yet according to the state of California, she is a nurse in good standing, free to work in any hospital or medical clinic.

We have a health care crisis, alright. And it starts on a much lower level than the candidates’ arguments over their policies about provisions of coverage. What does sanctioned health care actually mean? Who delivers it? How qualified are they?

This is not very reassuring against the onslaught of advancing euthanasia.