"Didn't the Legislature do something?
Yes. In 2002, lawmakers told the state's universities and community colleges to set a goal of doubling the number of nurses being graduated.
Lawmakers didn't provide any money with the mandate, though. The deadline for doubling is this year, but the goal won't be met."
From the deep well of the veritably miraculous, natural-law-driven, and red-white-and-blue Free Market comes... nothing. That's why the market is nowhere mentioned in the article. Just the lack of a legislative rescue.
The nursing shortage is not only still with us after decades of dire concern, it is going to get much, much worse. And the healthcare market is doing all it can to exacerbate the problem, being "profit-driven" as it claims (if there are fewer nurses to pay then there's more money left over for the middlemen and women.) By its own design it is contributing to this critical problem. While self-destructing, of course.
Actually there are no "profits" in healthcare. Just subsidies, from which takings are maximized by limiting the provision of healthcare itself. Quite the opposite of "building a better mousetrap." Flimsier and cheaper mousetraps provide more "profit" to the big fish.
Appeals to the Arizona State Legislature have also been predictably near-useless, of course.
Before a species goes extinct its population dwindles. It is farcical to think that the number of nurses could ever become so small that they are unable to produce enough "offspring" to continue the profession, isn't it? Can we be sure about that?
From N=1 at "Universal Health":
"As a nurse who has been on the front lines of hospital overcrowding, of too many traumas and not enough trauma bays and trauma nurses, I know full well that nurses will carry the motherload of work, of agony, of sacrifice and of loss in a flu pandemic. Ogilvy PR staff willl be cozily sheltering in place, as will the HHS honchos, while nurses will be on the front lines of mass suffering, death and of loss. It will be nurses who run from patient to patient doling out limited oxygen supplies, who after running out of N95 respirators, will continue on and give care while they put their own lives at risk. And it will be nurses who remain with patients as others stay in the safe havens and shelter in place."
Just as disease can bring the remaining members of an endangered species to the brink of extinction, nursing as it is now practiced could very possibly take a hit from which it is not prepared to fully recover.
Maybe nurses are members of a dying species.
