Nursing and health care reform

I have been writing comments on various sites concerning the stampede of nurses leaving the profession over the last 20 years. In a opinion piece written by Scott Gottlieb at the WSJ the same anti health care reform arguments are rehashed again and again and they ignore any comments to the contrary. The fact is without reform there will very few nurses to run a healthcare system.


One of my comments addressing Gottlieb's article.


The average age of a practicing nurse in America is 47. No one wants to be nurse anymore, why is that?

I have been a nurse for thirty years, in that time period the health industry has become the multi billion dollars business it is today. In these years as profits have grown, one of the ways to keep costs down has been to targeted nurses, patient to staff ratios have eroded, nurses has been out sourced to agencies with NO benefits and nursing positions once held by nurses are now filled with cheap "techs" , a high school diploma and a week of training is all you need.
Talk about "evil" socialized medicine all you want, but the is fact with out meaningful reform the next time you or a relative are in the hospital and you put a call light on and no one shows up, or if they do they are a tech who doesn't understand why you can't breath and they have to go find someone who does, remember that medicine is a business and the bottom line is the most important thing.

The medical industry has made a concerted effort to drive nurses out of industry to keep costs down and it has worked. Every major nursing organization supports meaningful healthcare reform with a public option and some a single payer. We are the people who see how healthcare really works in this country, you should pay attention.