For the last two years, travel nurses have made some of the best money in America. Leaving their families behind to take on critical roles in hospitals sometimes across the country, these nurses have filled gaps in patient care during the worst pandemic in a century.
Americans should be thanking travel nurses for what they’ve done. Instead, if a few politicians and health care trade associations have their way, this opportunity may not be available for nurses who want to make great money, hospitals that are short-staffed, and patients who are left unattended in short-staffed hospitals.
As outlined in a recent Washington Post op-ed and at PolitiFact, bipartisan Members of Congress and a number of health care trade groups like the American Hospital Association are seeking investigations into travel nurse companies because they allegedly fear price gouging and excessive profits. They somehow believe that supply and demand don’t apply to nurses during a pandemic, even as health care costs and hospital administrator pay have soared since long before the pandemic.
If there is a healthcare worker shortage, putting caps on travel nurse pay is economically insane - economic reactions to supply-and-demand are real, and compensation changes accordingly. Even worse is that it puts the blame on the wrong people. Travel nurse agencies are providing staff who fill critical gaps left by, yes, an unexpected worldwide pandemic, but also utter mismanagement by many hospital administrators.
Take Vanderbilt Medical Center, for example. This is a world-renowned hospital where RaDonda Vaught accidentally killed a patient. She immediately owned up to it, yet she faces years in jail for medication errors – a common problem in the industry because human beings aren’t perfect. Meanwhile, the administrators whose medication dispensing program was broken, who lied to the patient's family and state health officials, seem to have gotten off scot-free. Of course, these same administrators fired Vaught.
Why would any nurse want to work at Vanderbilt after watching what Vaught went through? And her case is just the most egregious. Stories abound of nurses who are told to take more patients than standards allow, creating unsafe environments for patients and risking nurses' licenses. Nurses are told to pay extra attention to patient pain out of fear of bad reviews and lost federal money, instead of focusing on real patient care. And nurses who had reasonable concerns about the COVID-19 vaccinations were often fired, even if they offered to wear masks and take other precautions.
Travel nurses were never intended to be a long-term solution to staffing problems. Yet hospitals have increasingly relied on them since long before the pandemic. This is financially insane - hospital administrators should use travel nurses to fill short-term gaps while developing and implementing processes to hire and retain excellent full-time nurses who will stay for years, for far less cost to the hospital. It's also bad for patients, because travel nurses are skilled, but they aren't as specialized as the nurse who has been on the same medical floor with the same staff and using the same hospital procedures for years.
The Republicans and Democrats who want to ignore nursing economics are throwing the patient’s most important hospital liaison under the bus. These are the same people who said to trust them during the pandemic – but it makes sense that they want to blame nurses and travel agencies, because otherwise they would have to make politically difficult decisions regarding our exorbitantly expensive healthcare system and face down politically powerful hospital administrators. And I suspect that the same American Hospital Association which blames nursing agencies wouldn’t want that.
Mike Feuz is an economic consultant by day and a research associate for the think tank Free the People by night. He has a Master’s Degree in economics from George Mason University, and his work has been published by Real Clear Policy, The Washington Examiner, and Inside Sources.