New Report from the Center for American Progress...
As our nation grapples with reforming the U.S. health care system to cover the uninsured, improve the quality of health care, and cut overall costs in the long term, we must consider provisions to assure an adequate health care workforce.
Primary care clinicians continue to decrease in numbers and there are many pockets around the country without enough health care providers overall. Researchers estimate that policies to expand coverage to all Americans would increase demand for physician services by 25 percent. Our nation already suffers from a long-standing shortage of nurses, and the American Hospital Association calculates 116,000 registered nurse positions are unfilled at U.S. hospitals and 100,000 jobs are vacant in nursing homes.
This is an especially important time to examine these shortages as Congress considers expanding access to health care to the entire nation and the jobless rate in our country hovers at 10 percent. Congress and the Obama administration have a historic opportunity to prepare to the nation for health care reform in 2010 as well as solve several long-standing problems in the way federal subsidies support health care workforce training programs.
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