Reduce Rates of Spending on Nursing Care? N.Y. Times

Cutting reimbursements to nurses is a false economy. It will come back and bite you some other place.

There is no way they can cut nursing care costs any more than they already have. I notice this brave soul didn't note his name in the article.
Somebody needs to revisit the data before they go off spouting their anon opinion.

Hello?! What about eliminating the insurance indusry!

Centers for Medicare and Medcaid have stated they are level funding, meaning this year's budget is the same as last years. Nursing is a big ticket item.

Nursing is big ticket because as the vast majority of care that people receive in the hospital, it's essential. Private insurance on the other hand does nothing to contribute to provision of care. The thing is, the insurance giants spend on average 30 cents of every premium dollar on overhead, admin and profits, as compared to Medicare's 2%.

Several people in my own family who I consider generally informed, smart/educated INSIST that the reason healthcare in America is so expensive is because NURSES make so much money. Arrgh!!!

I say look to the profits reaped by greedy hospital CEO's, the insurance industry and the drug companies. I think I've more than earned every dime I've made as a nurse. I honestly think the general public has NO CLUE how hard nurses work and how essential our responsibilities are to their chances of getting a good outcome.

Cut nursing staff, force us to work in impossible conditions and people die. This has been proven in many studies and I have a feeling the greedy hospital CEO's and powerful insurance and drug compainies are well aware of these studies.

They ARE well aware. They're just stuck into using stop-gap measures to lower short term costs, without considering their effect on long term costs.

We just need to keep educating our elected officials with the real data. I don't know where the 10% figure for PHRMA comes from but it certainly seems suspect. The biggest economy measure we can make is to attack administrative spending costs.

One avenue to attack this false economy is to quantify how nurses reduce hospital costs through infection control measures, fall prevention and prevention of decubitus ulcers. All of these adverse events are excluded from reimbursement by CMS rules.

Read some articles by Buerhaus & Needleman. They actually show that maintaining safe nurse staffing levels do save money, by decreasing decubs, nosocomial infections, etc. Add that to Aiken's reports regarding increased morbidity/mortality rates with short-staffing, and you have a strong case for maintaining strong nurse staffing levels.