The Presidents View on Foreign Nurses

Many posters thought the new US President would open the doors for IEN. Now the President is on record.


http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/new...th_care_fo.php

REPRESENTATIVE CAPPS: Thank you very much. I'm Lois Capps, and I will love to follow the doctor. I also want to say to Senator Kennedy, this is the time. As one of three nurses in the U.S. Congress, the proposals you are putting forward resonate. Nurses do provide quality care. They help reduce costs through increased preventive care, and they deliver cost-effective primary care, along with physicians, especially in underserved areas.


But we have a huge shortage of nurses today. And estimates are that the U.S. will be lacking over 500,000 nurses in the next seven years. Our nursing schools are only able to admit a tiny fraction of applicants. The great -- greatest bottleneck for educating more nurses comes from the lack of nursing school faculty.


You've done a great job by proposing an increase in nursing education in your 2010 budget and by including nurse education funding in the Recovery Act. I'd love to hear your thoughts. If not -- if there's no time today, I'd love to pursue this -- there are other nurses in the room -- on how we can further advance nursing education and faculty training, because they are going to be essential to our overall efforts to contain costs while expanding and improving care. Thank you very much.

THE PRESIDENT: Well, let me respond to this right away, because it's not that complicated. Nurses provide extraordinary care. I mean, they are -- they are the front lines of the health care system. And they don't get paid very well. Their working conditions aren't as good as they should be. And when it comes to nurse faculty, they get paid even worse than active nurses. So what happens is, is that it is very difficult for a nurse practitioner to go into teaching, because they're losing money.


The notion that we would have to import nurses makes absolutely no sense. And for people who get fired up about the immigration debate and yet don't notice that we could be training nurses right here in the United States -- and there are a lot of people who would love to be in that helping profession and yet we just aren't providing the resources to get them trained -- that's something that we've got to fix. That should be a no-brainer. That should be a bipartisan no-brainer to make sure that we've got the best possible nursing staffs in the country. (Applause.)

Sounds to me he is not for any foreign nurses being imported to easy the suppose nursing shortage.