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Date: 2024-10-10 Page is: DBtxt003.php txt00022124
HEALTHCARE
FAIR PAY FOR NURSES

Hospitals executives want Biden to restrict wages of traveling nurses. Really!


Original article: https://medium.egbertowillies.com/hospitals-executives-want-biden-to-restrict-wages-of-traveling-nurses-really-this-is-my-response-9ed2888fa14a
Burgess COMMENTARY
I was very fortunate to get a superb education thanks to my parents. My father was a schoolmaster who understood the immense value of education, and my parents did everything they could to give me opportunity through education. I grew up in the UK and have lived in the USA for most of my adult life. Some higher education in the USA is world class, but most grade school education in the United States is rather poor.
This has huge implications for the performance of the United States in the future, and also explains much of its performance over the past several decades.
I visited North America from the UK when I was a student. In fact I spent the summer of both 1960 and the summer of 1961 in North America. Courtesy of the Canadian government, I was allowed to do a summer job in Canada which was really my introduction to the world of employment and work. During this time I was able to compare what my education was like in the UK with what was happening in Canada. The conclusion was that my education was about a year ahead of my Canadian contemporaries.
Later on these trips I travelled extensively around the United States with some new Canadian friends. We compared our education with some of the young people we met in the United States in our travels. We concluded that the Canadians were a year ahead of the Americans. It seemed that my '6th form' work at school in the UK was pretty much equivalent to the 2nd year college work in the USA.
While this assessment may be somewhat superficial, it does ring true and does help to explain a lot of what has been happening in the USA over the past several decades.
Peter Burgess
Hospitals executives want Biden to restrict wages of traveling nurses. Really!

Egberto Willies

February 12th, 2022

Hospital executives make millions without question. They want the Biden administration to restrict the salaries of traveling nurses. Here is my take.

Nurses deserve more pay than the executives

America is a capitalist country that purports to believe in supply and demand for just about every product and service. I do not think that all products and services should fall under that purview, but corporations are always preaching that. The indoctrination is that it leads to efficiency. Of course, if one has an accident or illness, supply-and-demand is not only immoral but the last thing on one’s mind.

During the pandemic, when nurses are in high demand, especially in places where many refuse to get vaccinated or follow safety protocols, their salaries follow all the capitalist rules for nurses willing to go on the road to follow the demand. Travel nurses’ salaries went from $1k+ per week to $2.5k per week.

What do these hospitals now want? They want the government to intervene in their “free markets” to cut nurses’ salaries.

During the pandemic, there have been both state and federal moves towards enacting legislation specifically aimed towards more regulation for staffing agencies and limiting travel nurse pay rates. Most recently, the American Health Care Association/National Center for Assisted Living, LeadingAge and a coalition of long-term care and senior living organizations sent a letter to White House officials warning against the “price gouging” happening in staffing agencies and how the practice is harmful to both patients and providers, who receive fixed reimbursement primarily through Medicare and Medicaid.

That letter was followed by another one, signed by 200 supporters, urging Congress to enlist federal agencies with competition and consumer protection authority to investigate the conduct of nurse staffing agencies to determine if it is the product of anticompetitive activity and/or violates consumer protection laws. The letter cited that nursing staffing agencies are sometimes taking as much as 40% of the fee collected from hospitals, adding that continuing to pay the high fees to staffing agencies is “ simply unsustainable.”

Supporters behind the movement to cap travel nurses’ pay say that the pandemic has thrust the need for more requirements for staffing agencies into a major spotlight and that ignoring the financial and regulatory issues brought on could lead to long-term impacts.

Long-term impacts? I sure hope so. Maybe they will realize that for-profit healthcare is a farce. One hopes to see healthcare as a humane service that should not fall under the capitalist system. Let’s hope we realize the promise of Medicare For All.

The hypocrisy is astounding. CEOs of large hospitals have an average salary of $1.4 million. The nurses, doctors, custodians, and others take risks as these parasites get wealthy from the intellect and service of others. Nurses to date are overworked and underpaid. If you want to save money, cut the administrators’ pay and stop paying significant dividends to freeloading healthcare stockholders.



☎Learn more about the author here. 🖊Sign up to read all my stories and thousands more. Originally published at https://egbertowillies.com on February 12, 2022.

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