Well, it seems that to address part of the health-care crisis in the US--namely the nursing shortage--BushCo is turning its efforts to increasing the insourcing of nurses at the expense of healthcare in such "third-world" nations as the Philippines, India, and China.
The New York Times is running a cover story about efforts to step up the insourcing of nursing: U.S. Plan to Lure Nurses May Hurt Poor Nations.
Senator Brownback (R-Kansas) has introduced a "little-noticed" provision into the immigration bill:
The legislation is expected to pass this week, and the Senate provision, which removes the limit on the number of nurses who can immigrate, has been largely overlooked in the emotional debate over illegal immigration.
According to Senator Brownback, "who sponsored the proposal ... it was needed to help the United States cope with a growing nursing shortage."
There does seem to be a nursing shortage in the U.S. Having spent the past year and a half taking care of my very ill mother, who has had 17 hospitalizations since January 2005, I can attest to hospitals being chronically "short-staffed." But my suspicions are always raised--are they really short-staffed, or is this shortage a result of increasing "efficiency," i.e. more $$$$$ for the hospitals. This possibly created short-staffedness, and the concommitant over-working of the nurses, makes it a less attractive profession, leaves less nurses to teach at nursing schools, and then, lo, and behold, there actually is a shortage of nurses. I'm sorry to admit that I'm conjecturing about this, but I wonder what a little research would turn up. Indeed, a lobbyist for a hospital association, which supports the measure, while trying to downplay how much of a "nurse-drain" this might cause for the targeted developing countries, admits in a convoluted fashion that the insourcing of nurses becomes a self-perpetuating cycle at the expense of training future generations of US nurses:
" ... it's certainly true that the longer the United States puts off investing in training nurses, the more pressure there will be to find nurses abroad."
While the American Hospital Association supports the plan, public health officials abroad are appalled:
Public health experts in poor countries, told about the proposal in recent days, reacted with dismay and outrage, coupled with doubts that their nurses would resist the magnetic pull of the United States, which sits at the pinnacle of the global labor market for nurses.
Removing the immigration cap, they said, would particularly hit the Philippines, which sends more nurses to the United States than any other country, at least several thousand a year. Health care has deteriorated there in recent years as tens of thousands of nurses have moved abroad. Thousands of ill-paid doctors have even abandoned their profession to become migrant-ready nurses themselves, Filipino researchers say.
"The Filipino people will suffer because the U.S. will get all our trained nurses," said George Cordero, president of the Philippine Nurse Association. "But what can we do?"
Interestingly enough, the American Nurses Association opposes the move:
The American Nurses Association, a professional trade association that represents 155,000 registered nurses, opposes the measure. The group said it was concerned the provision would lead to a flood of nurse immigrants and would damage both the domestic work force and the home countries of the immigrants.
"We're disappointed that Congress, instead of providing appropriations for domestic nursing programs, is outsourcing the education of nurses," said Erin McKeon, the group's associate director of government affairs.
Exactly. Another example of Republicans (although this issue probably doesn't fall according to neatly partisan lines) protecting the bottom line of corporations (even if "non-profit" hospitals in some cases) against the interests of working people here and abroad.
Public health officials in Africa are particularly alarmed at how this nursing drain could affect AID-devasted nations in Africa:
Eric Buch, the top health adviser to the New Partnership for Africa's Development, an Africa-wide undertaking initiated by the continent's heads of state, said he expected that recruiting agencies would set up in African countries where nurses were trained in English and that they would advertise the change in the American law.
"You'll see that emerge, that's my guess," Professor Buch, who teaches health policy at the University of Pretoria, in South Africa, said in a telephone interview. "The United States could become a place where we bleed our health care workers."
The health consequences of this nursing drain have already been devastating in the Philippines:
A nurse in the Philippines would earn a starting salary of less than $2,000 a year compared with at least $36,000 a year in the United States, said Dr. Jaime Galvez Tan, a medical professor at the University of the Philippines who led the country's National Institutes of Health.
He said the flight of nurses had had a corrosive effect on health care. Most Filipinos died without medical attention in 2003, just as they had three decades earlier. And the percentage of women who gave birth with a doctor, nurse or midwife attending has declined in recent years.
Based on surveys, Dr. Galvez Tan estimates that 80 percent of the country's government doctors have become nurses or are enrolled in nursing programs, hoping for an American green card. "I plead for justice," he said in a telephone interview. "There has to be give and take, not just take, take, take by the United States."
No nation is an island. The US healthcare crisis contributes to the healthcare crisis around the globe. Can't we as a nation invest in training future generations of nurses? Shouldn't we be able to do this and, in fact, "export" nurses, who could help train nurses around the globe where they are vitally needed? Imagine what we could do with all the money that the Republicans are squandering through permanent war, corporate tax cuts, and tax cuts for the top 1%.