SUBSCRIBE TO OUR FREE NEWSLETTER
Daily news & progressive opinion—funded by the people, not the corporations—delivered straight to your inbox.
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
nurses
Nurses Are the Best of Us. Trump's Republican Party Should Take Notes.
The Trump administration has excluded nurses from a key loan program designed to help those with professional degrees. This is not only a slap in the face to nurses everywhere, but puts all Americans seeking care at increased risk and further harms our broken healthcare system.
Dec 16, 2025
Apart from his “concepts of a plan,” it’s clear that Donald Trump doesn’t know much about healthcare. But there is one cardinal rule: don’t mess with nurses. After all, these are the folks who keep our healthcare system alive. My mother and grandmother are both nurses. They work brutal hours under nonstop pressure, juggling complex cases, emotional trauma, and physical exhaustion, while still showing up every day with the skill, compassion, and steady judgment required. As someone who’s led two of Michigan’s largest health departments, I know that if we want stronger hospitals, better patient outcomes, and a reliable healthcare workforce, we have to invest in our nurses and their education.
But Trump’s Department of Education decided to move us in exactly the opposite direction. Under rules buried deep in his “Big Beautiful Bill,” only certain graduate programs qualify as “professional degrees” eligible for higher loan caps, up to $50,000 a year or $200,000 total. And unbelievably, graduate nursing programs were excluded from that list of programs.
Our federal government wants to make it harder for nurses to step into the roles our healthcare system desperately needs to fill? Yes, you’re reading that right. This not only is a slap in the face to nurses everywhere, it leaves Americans with less options and safety in the care we can receive. As a doctor, I know our system is nothing without the care nurses provide. These continued attacks on Medicare and now on nurses from the White House are taking our broken system to the brink of failure, straining our country’s staffing crisis. This will hit rural hospitals hardest, where nurse practitioners are already providing so much primary care to patients.
I can’t think of a career more worthy of a “professional” designation than nursing, the most honest and trusted profession in America. President Trump has messed with the wrong folks.
Your circumstances shouldn’t hold you back from being able to pursue the kind of career and education you deserve. Federal student loans are one of the most effective tools we have to recruit talented folks into the nursing profession and make sure they can keep growing in their careers. When nurses can afford to become NPs, midwives, specialists, and educators, hospitals stay safely staffed and patients get the care they deserve.
Here in Michigan, we’re facing a projected 19% shortage of nurses by 2037. It’s not hard to understand why. Across the state, nurses are facing increasingly brutal working conditions as our healthcare systems consolidate, and the CEOs at the top put profits over patients. In the past few months, I’ve joined striking nurses in Mount Clemens, Rochester, and Grand Blanc who are all calling for safer staffing. And I can’t think of a career more worthy of a “professional” designation than nursing, the most honest and trusted profession in America. President Trump has messed with the wrong folks.
Without nurses, we are all worse off. We know you can’t strengthen the healthcare workforce by choking off the pathway to advanced training. And you cannot improve patient care while putting up new barriers for the very people who provide it.
Make no mistake, this is straight from the Project 2025 playbook. We knew they wanted to defund female-dominated professions (about 90 percent of nurses are women), come for working class Americans, and make education and healthcare even less accessible.
These loans aren’t a luxury. They’re how working nurses, the backbone of our hospitals, move into the advanced roles our health system depends on. The cost of attendance for nurses pursuing graduate degrees on average is over $30,000 per year, which exceeds the proposed annual cap of $20,500 per year. Without accessible loans, we lose future providers to burnout, stalled careers, and financial barriers that shut out entire communities.
We need loan programs that open doors, not close them.
Keep ReadingShow Less
New Report Sheds Light on the Pitfalls of AI-Powered 'Gig Nursing'
"These apps are a symptom of broken healthcare infrastructure that is now victim to corporate takeovers. Failing to act on both fronts poses risks to our healthcare system and the workers who power it," wrote one of the researchers.
Dec 17, 2024
While gig work is fairly common in a number of sectors in the American economy, a brief released Tuesday by the progressive-leaning think tank the Roosevelt Institute details how the gig model now has its tentacles in the healthcare industry, and argues it is creating new hazards for workers and patients.
The brief, authored by Groundwork Collaborative fellow Katie Wells and King's College London lecturer Funda Ustek Spilda, sounds the alarm over "on-demand nursing firms" such as CareRev, Clipboard Health, ShiftKey, ShiftMed, and others which have gained traction by promising hospitals more control and nurses and nursing assistants more flexibility.
Practically speaking, these "new Uber-style apps use algorithmic scheduling, staffing, and management technologies—software often touted by companies as cutting-edge 'AI,' or artificial intelligence—to connect understaffed medical facilities with nearby nurses and nursing assistants looking for work," according to the brief.
The authors, whose research was largely based on interviews with 29 gig nurses, argued that these apps "encourage nurses to work for less pay," do not offer nurses clarity when it comes to scheduling and amount or type of work, are not sufficiently concerned with worker safety, and "can threaten patient well-being by placing nurses in unfamiliar clinical environments with no onboarding or facility training."
These platforms are also using the same tactics as the ride-hailing service Uber when it comes to lobbying state legislatures in order to shield themselves from labor regulations, according to the authors, who noted that larger hospital systems in the country have included gig nurses in their operations since 2016.
The researchers argued that while the rates on a platform like ShiftKey can be higher for nurses and nurses assistants, nursing on-demand platforms can create a race to the bottom for wages: "The nurses and nursing assistants who use these apps must pay fees to bid on shifts, and they win those bids by offering to work for lower hourly rates than their fellow workers."
When the nursing on-demand firms classify the workers as self-employed, nurses and nursing assistants are also exposed to higher risk because they are "excluded from the protections of local, state, and federal law on minimum wage, overtime pay, workers' compensation, retirement benefits, employment-based health insurance, and paid sick days."
Workers are also rated based on facility feedback and determinations made by the algorithm, and can be penalized if they cancel a shift because they are sick or have a conflict, per the report.
"In at least one case, a nursing assistant went into work at a hospital while sick with Covid-19 because she could not figure out how to cancel a shift without lowering her rating," according to the authors.
By way of background, the authors of the brief also argue that the often-invoked "nursing shortage" is actually misleading term. In fact, there is no shortage of available nurses and nursing assistants, but rather a "growing number of nurses and nursing assistants who refuse to accept chronically understaffed, underpaid, unsafe, and high-stress workplaces," according to the brief, which cites outside research.
In fact, many of the workers interviewed said they would continue working for nursing on demand services because broadly speaking they like the work. According to the brief, interviewees said "over and over again how important flexible schedules are to their lives, especially their own caregiving, be it for children, spouses, or elders"—though the authors of the study wrote that this does not mean the concerns expressed by the workers are not worth paying attention to.
The rise of gig nursing is taking place on the backdrop of increasing corporate ownership over the healthcare industry writ large, including the rise of private equity ownership of medical facilities and medical staffing agencies.
"Policymakers need to be proactive and step in to regulate these platforms and provide proper labor protections for all nurses, gig and non-gig alike," said Wells in a Tuesday statement. "But these apps are a symptom of broken healthcare infrastructure that is now victim to corporate takeovers. Failing to act on both fronts poses risks to our healthcare system and the workers who power it."
Wells also told The Guardian that the gig companies don't release data and the industry is unregulated, meaning the true extent to which the U.S. healthcare system is leaning on gig nurses is unknown—but she said it is clearly a growing trend.
These on-demand nursing apps can also have a negative impact on patients, according to sources the authors spoke with. One nurse recounted that "there have been times when I've been unable to access patient records or find supply closets."
"Other workers report that the lack of management and resources can result in major safety lapses for patients, such as gig nurses not being able to get updated information on patient medications or instructions about whether patients need help with feeding," the authors wrote.
Keep ReadingShow Less
What a Nurses’ Strike Says About the Meaning of Work Under Capitalism
The strike has led many of the nurses to discuss the ways that understaffing, paperwork, and the bottom-line efficiency fixation that are inherent in capitalist organizations eat into the quality of care they can give.
Oct 22, 2023
Since the nurses of RWJBarnabas hospital in New Brunswick, New Jersey, first struck early in August, I have had many conversations with them while visiting their picket lines. From the beginning, I have been struck by the extent to which they miss their work and their patients, and by their desire to increase the ratio of nurses to patients so the patients can get the care they need.
This obviously does not fit the stereotype that people only work for the paycheck. It also raises questions about the meaning of work, and about why capitalism creates pressures that operate to destroy the worthwhile and even fun parts of jobs.
Marxist and other theories of alienation often seem to say that workers hate their jobs because capitalism has created alienated work. In its narrowest sense, “alienation” simply means that much of the value of the work that workers do is taken away from the worker and becomes profit for the employers. More broadly, alienation means that employers control what workers do, the conditions in which they do it, and the product of the labor, and that the result is to remove control, creativity, and joy from the job.
The pleasure they should get from taking care of the patients is whittled away day by day as paperwork and understaffing mean they cannot give the patients the care they need.
Yet this is not what I am hearing from the nurses. And, I might add, it is not what I heard from truck drivers when I studied one of their Los Angeles local unions 50 years ago. (See Teamsters Rank and File, Columbia University Press, 1982.) Drivers saw what they were doing as useful, enjoyed “building up their routes” and pleasing the people to whom they made deliveries, and resented it when employers took action that might have increased their profits, but hurt their customers and the drivers’ relationships with the customers.
What does all this mean? To me, it means that people get joy and pleasure out of helping other people. This is particularly evident with the nurses: The ways they help their patients are very meaningful to them, and, when they are striking, they miss those patients who have recurrent need for care and who they have come to know. As they tell me, the replacement (scab) nurses do not know these patients and will not take as good care of them.
I think this goes very deep into who people are and what society is like. In Marx’s terms, I think helping other people is part of our “species-being,” built into our history and our cultures by many centuries of experience. We like to produce use values for other people, whether this is by taking care of them when they are sick or by delivering goods to them. Undoubtedly, nurses feel this more that truck drivers, since their involvement with other people is more intense and concrete.
Unfortunately, capitalism is a system built to produce and increase profits by focusing on exchange value rather than use value. In terms of the nurses, even though they work for what is ostensibly a nonprofit hospital, they are under constant pressure to work harder, and to serve more patients, and sicker patients, with fewer nurses, while the chief executive officer and other higher-ups make $10 million and even more each year. As one nurse phrased it to me, what they care about is the records we enter into our computers more than the patients. These records, it should be noted, are the basis for the billing that brings the money in. Record-keeping also takes nurses’ time away from the patients.
One nurse told me about what the pressure to do more with fewer people means in practice. She is one of a few workers assigned to an intensive care unit for children. One day, another unit had a staff shortage, so the employer moved all the nurses from her unit to another floor to work with other patients. Her primary assignment that day had been intake—to admit children who needed intensive care to the unit, including filling out the relevant paperwork on the computer. On this particular day, she was admitting a child to the unit when alarms went off for two other children on the unit. In human terms: One child needed to be admitted, and two others had potentially life-threatening emergencies at the same time. Although a particularly bad instance of how understaffing works, this ethical dilemma and associated pain and trauma to the nurses occurs in less acute forms every few days. Yet the paperwork gets filled out, the money comes in, and, in spite of the understaffing, some of the children do get good care even if others end up dead or seriously harmed by inadequate care.
What does this mean for the nurses? They feel guilt and conflict over the decisions their employers force them to make about who does and who does not get seen when. They see their dignity attacked, and their professional knowledge debased, when their supervisors ignore their warnings and their concerns. And the pleasure they should get from taking care of the patients is whittled away day by day as paperwork and understaffing mean they cannot give the patients the care they need.
One of the potential ways in which this strike can help is by forcing safe staffing legislation through the state legislature—although so far, the governor and legislature seem cool to this idea, perhaps because of their economic and personal ties to RWJBarnabas management and to the “healthcare” industry more generally. Another is that they may win contractual provisions that help them defend safe staffing levels. A third is that the heightened solidarity they have built up with each other will let them resist managers’ bad decisions more effectively on a day-to-day basis.
In addition, the strike has led many of the nurses to think and discuss the meaning of their jobs and the ways that understaffing, paperwork, and the bottom-line efficiency fixation that are inherent in capitalist organizations eat into the quality of care they can give, their sense of dignity, and the joy they should get from taking care of the sick. In my view, the only way to solve these problems for them and for future generations is to replace capitalism with a new system that some of us call “socialism,” with the understanding that we will only come to understand this new system as we build it. I hope some of these nurses, and billions of other people in addition, will come to agree with me on that before capitalism creates an unlivable environment for humanity.
Keep ReadingShow Less
Most Popular