Re: Nursing Shortage

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Regarding the alleged nursing shortage that Carol mentioned, I have
seen posts from nurses on newsgroups who said that the nursing
shortage was caused by low pay and bad working conditions. That
shouldn't be a surprise since the laws of economics apply to the
nursing field, just as they do other fields. Since hospitals didn't
want to pay enough to make being a nurse worthwhile, there was a
"shortage".

I just wanted to point out that the alleged shortage wasn't some sort
of unpredictable or supernatural phenomenon. In essence, the
hospitals created their own nursing "shortage" by failing to provide
incentives for people to become nurses.

Of course, in today's economy, people are reading about the predicted
nursing shortage and rushing into the field, flooding the nursing
schools, in the hopes of avoiding the upcoming ravages of global labor
wage arbitrage. (Of course, this raises the question, if the middle
class becomes impoverished, where will the hospitals and the
government find the money to pay the nurses so that they can be middle
class?)