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Regressive. Divinity on the list, but not nursing and advance nursing degrees.
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I heard they are getting rid of the Department of Education anyway.
Seems fairly regressive to health care costs for everyone.
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Just to note, this is probably American Medical Association lobby change since it impacts graduate nurse programs so not RNs but Physician Assistants/Nurse Practitioners and like.
there's been nursing shortage for my whole life, what the hell is wrong with people? why can't we take care of each other
It's possible you've been lied to. Every single industry always says "there's a shortage" so they can justify expanding the labor pool to drive salary costs down.
Anything to give the for profit medical and insurance industry an excuse to cut nurse's wages. So transparent.
It seems like there has probably been a lot of scope creep in the nursing role due to the artificially induced doctor shortage. Wonder if the de jure/de facto gap there plays a role in this decision and how it’s perceived.
Incredible things happening in America these days.
This applying to graduate degrees really does seem like the result of AMA lobbying to keep Nurse Practitioner numbers down. It is state and program dependent, but in some states NPs have prescribing authority, which cuts into the domain of MD/DO practice in the US. There are of course merits to the argument about NP training vs MD/DO training in Pharmacology, but overall this limits patient access in America to prescribed medicine.

Congress, at the behest of AMA lobbying, had kept the number of Medicare funded residency slots capped at the same number since 1997 until the Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2021 which added 1000 new residence slots[0]. Starting in FY 2023 (October 1 2022) no more than 200 new positions would be added each FY meaning the full 1000 could be created no sooner than FY 2028 (October 1 2027). Given the medical school timeline of 7-10 years training (school, residency, fellowship) we won't see any meaningful impact from that until the mid 2030s.

The US already has a much lower physician to patient ratio than Nordic countries (as a comparison between wealthy, western countries). The us has 2.97 active physicians per 1000 population, of which 2.52 are actual direct patient care physicians[2]. For comparison Sweden is ~5 per 1,000, Norway 4.5 per 1,000, Denmark 4.45 per 1,000, and Finland at 3.8 per 1000. Extra Bonus (Russian Federation reports 4.0 per 1,000)[3]. Note these numbers are as of 2020.

In America, most people interface with doctors in order to get tests run and medicine prescribed. Reducing the incentive for RNs to move into NP by removing it's professional degree status will likely lower the amount of prescribing individuals a patient can interface with, increasing bottleneck and time to care.

[0] - https://www.sgu.edu/news-and-events/new-residency-slots-appr... [1] - https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8370355/ [2] - https://www.aamc.org/data-reports/data/2023-key-findings-and... [3] - https://www.worldatlas.com/articles/countries-with-the-most-...

> In America, most people interface with doctors in order to get tests run and medicine prescribed.

In my experience, NPs already carry a lot of this load, especially in non medical speciality cases (i.e., what a GP or PCP would do).

Another example of self-harm to protect a wealthy segment of the population (doctors) at the expense of those who need medical care. It's not just time to care that's the problem. Scarcity drives up prices as well.

Why is there medicine and then like 8 kinds of medicine? Does this mean something like anesthesiology is also not 'professional?' Or why is podiatry singled out but not the others?
Excluding nurse practitioners & physical therapists but including osteopaths, theologian & chiropractics is insane.
Theology is a professional degree, while Nursing is not. Dumbfounding. Handmaid's Tale may turn out not to be fiction after all.
This is all about student loans, and destroying the academia, with a nice dose of quackery and anti-intellectualism thrown in for amusement. While it does not impact me at all to know my degrees are no longer 'professional', it really impacts folks trying to get loans to pay for college. Having less nurses and teachers out there is going to create many problems in the coming years, that is if we actually care about we the people.