Thread: Democrats’ Coronavirus Bill Imports More Foreign Doctors, Nurses

Democrats’ Coronavirus Bill Imports More Foreign Doctors, Nurses

by Neil Munro 13 May 2020

The House Democrats’ next coronavirus bill will help centralize the nation’s healthcare system by giving hospital chains more power to import many more doctors from overseas, say critics.

The wider pipeline of migrants would help healthcare companies expand their marketplace reach, but it would also sideline many U.S. healthcare professionals and many Americans who want to become doctors, said Kevin Lynn, the founder of Doctors without Jobs and U.S. Tech Workers.
“What we don’t see in this bill is an investment in our people,” he said. “We’re going to make it easier for foreign healthcare workers to come here and work under the umbrella of fighting ‘COVD-19.'”

That is bad news for many thousands of Americans who have passed medical tests but have been denied a slot in the limited number of gateway residency jobs at hospitals, he said. Congress should help Americans help each other by providing more funds to train Americans to become doctors and nurses, he said.

More training of Americans would also reduce the corporate extraction of doctors and nurses from poor countries, such as India, Nigeria, and Sudan, he said. “If you are a doctor from Sudan, would the value-added of remaining in Sudan be greater than adding one more doctor in the United States?”

The Democrats’ bill is dubbed the HEROES Act, and it:

provides fast-track green cards for immigrant doctors who have coronavirus patients, and creates a new block of 12,000 green cards for foreign doctors plus their families.

gives fast-track work permits for foreign medical professionals, including doctors and nurses who work with victims of China’s coronavirus.
grants work permits for foreign nurses, doctors, and scientists who are working on coronavirus care and treatments.

requires the Department of Homeland Security to accept state medical-licensing rules, so helping companies import more foreign medical professionals via the least-demanding state.

allows foreign doctors in the U.S. on H-1B work visas to treat patients via telemedicine. This would help hospital chains to treat Americans with long-distance foreign doctors instead of with face-to-face interactions with American doctors.

The legislation also provides work permits for a huge number of illegal migrants who have jobs in the very broad category of “essential critical infrastructure.” That category includes janitors and food workers in hospitals, as well as stoop labor in agriculture.

The demand for foreign medical workers comes as many thousands of U.S. doctors and nurses have been furloughed amid the collapse in consumer demand following the coronavirus crash. In April, the medical sector lost 1.4 million jobs.

The new unemployment adds to the nation’s huge number of retired and part-time medical professionals.



Neil Munro
@NeilMunroDC

Advocates & media claim 200K DACA migrants are 'crucial' in coronavirus fight. Umm. Whatever their indiv merits, DACA are a tiny % of America's healthcare grads, of retired or sidelined HC profesnls, & of jobless Americans. Americans get the job done.



Progressives, Employers Say DACA Migrants 'Crucial' for Fighting Coronavirus
Pro-migration advocates say the nation will lose up to 200,000 critical workers in the coronavirus fight if Trump ends the DACA amnesty.

breitbart.com

11:20 AM · Apr 8, 2020·Twitter Web App

Democrats are also using the crisis to push for greater immigration, despite the overwhelming public demand that Americans get hired for any jobs during the crash.

Many GOP legislators oppose legislation that would expand the award of green cards to migrants. So the bill claims not to create new green cards, but only to “recapture previously unused immigrant visas” that were available in prior years but which were not used.

In the short term, the ‘HEROES’ bill is unlikely to pass, but it shows that the nation’s healthcare industry wants to flood the market with hospital-managed foreign doctors and nurses, said Lynn.



Neil Munro
@NeilMunroDC

Congress is stingy about funding hospital residencies for medical graduates -- so 1,000+ doctors fail to get residencies at hospitals in 2020. That puts many young doctors on the sidelines during a national epidemic. But Congress has a fix.



1,200 Young Doctors Sidelined by Lack of Training Residencies
Amid the epidemic, 1,200 new American doctors were sidelined because they were denied a medical residency for 2020.

breitbart.com

10:50 PM · Mar 21, 2020·Twitter Web App

This rush of new workers will be used by hospital chains to boost revenues and forced down wages — and to undermine Americans’ preference for dealing with familiar, local doctors, he said.

The hospital chains are already boosting their market share in the nation’s healthcare sector by buying up doctors’ officers, Lynn said. As the hospitals used imported doctors to fill the former offices of local doctors, they can funnel patients towards high-profit hospital services, he said.

The Democrats’ draft bill would allow the hospital chains to import more doctors to expand those vertical networks, he said. “It would preserve the profit margins — it doesn’t lead to better healthcare outcomes,” he said.

However, the healthcare sector is winning support in the Senate for a broader bill that would help healthcare companies gain more power over the supply of new doctors and nurses.

GOP Sen. David Perdue, (R-Ga.) is championing a companion bill that would provide 40,000 extra green cards for healthcare employers to import more foreign-trained doctors and nurse.

The Healthcare Workforce Resilience Act is backed by the major industry groups in the healthcare sector, including the American Medical Association, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the American Hospital Association, American Immigration Lawyers Association, and FWD.us, an advocacy group for West Coast investors.

The bill is backed by Sens. Dick Durbin (D-IL), Todd Young (R-IN), Chris Coons (D-DE), John Cornyn (R-TX), and Patrick Leahy (D-VT).



Neil Munro
@NeilMunroDC

The coronavirus crash has decisively shifted the public's ambivalent priorities on immigration: Away from politely welcoming migrants, and towards loudly demanding more jobs for American grads & blue-collars. Business & investors are fighting back ...



Washington Post Poll: Hispanics Are the Strongest Opponents of Immigration
A Washington Post poll shows that Hispanics are the strongest advocates for a near-total lockdown of legal immigration.

breitbart.com

12:35 PM · Apr 30, 2020·Twitter Web App

https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2...octors-nurses/

We do not need or want more foreign doctors or nurses.

We DEMAND 40 million illegal aliens, visa overstays, refugees, asylum, liars, and TPS are deported off our soil and OUT of our overcrowded, bankrupt, healthcare system for IMMEDIATE relief to the hospitals, medical facilities, and the American people who are paying for this!!!!

PAC Moves to Stop Amnesty, felon release, & foreign workers in HEROES Act

For National Release | May 14, 2020



Help our efforts by calling Congress & sharing/discussing this meme and release at (FACEBOOK HERE) .. (TWITTER HERE) .. (ALIPAC HERE) .. (GAB HERE)

https://www.alipac.us/f8/pac-moves-s...es-act-378207/

At height of pandemic, 1.4 million US health workers lose jobs

Ivan Couronne and Issam Ahmed

AFP May 14, 2020, 11:00 AM EDT












Two critical care nurses don protective equipment at Sharp Grossmont hospital in La Mesa, California (AFP Photo/MARIO TAMA)Washington (AFP) -

Dayna James has been an emergency nurse for 17 years -- and thought the COVID-19 pandemic would mean she'd have more work than ever.


Instead, she's filing for unemployment benefits, an ironic twist of fate shared by 1.4 million of America's 18 million health care personnel who have lost their jobs since March -- including 135,000 hospital workers.


"Here in south Florida, we don't have the patients, the hospital can't afford all of the staff to be on duty and just sit around," said James.


The 40-year-old mother of four lost a two day a week teaching job at a university hospital in March, and is barely getting any work at the children's hospital in Miami where she was previously a regularly contracted nurse.


The United States is the country hardest hit by the coronavirus pandemic, with more than 80,000 deaths and almost 1.4 million confirmed cases.


Epicenters include New York, New Jersey and other cities across the country, but not all regions have been affected equally, with certain localities seeing a far lower COVID-19 caseload.


At the same time, elective procedures have all been put on hold since March, people with chronic illnesses or even emergencies are avoiding coming to hospitals out of fear they may become infected with the virus, and lockdowns have reduced the numbers of accidents.


James does remain on call -- and was able to work on Sunday because of a shortage of staff on Mother's Day -- but her family is now mainly relying on her husband's salary.


"I see other places keeping nurses on staff just in case. It just feels somewhat unfair," she said.
In the capital Washington, a 34-year-old nurse who works in pre- and post-operative care at a major hospital said that she too was struggling.


"COVID has basically made my job almost obsolete," she said.


"We haven't done elective surgeries in two months, which is the main source of revenue for our department."


The nurse, who asked to remain anonymous, is employed on a "per diem" basis, like many in the US health care system.


Her weekly hours had gone down from 36 to around nine, and she is relying on unemployment benefits and her savings.


- 'House of cards' -


For Howard Markel, a medical historian at the University of Michigan, the outcomes have exposed the weaknesses inherent in the business models adopted by US health care providers.


"American health care is financed, expanded and makes a great many people wealthy by doing very expensive test and elective procedures, and building giant hospitals that are geared toward that type of business model," he said.


This has created incentives geared toward testing and intervention, whether they are medically really needed or not.


Health insurers, both public and private, "pay for putting tubes into people, not for talking to people," he said.


Since there is no single-payer public authority that mediates and caps prices, costs depend on negotiations between hospitals and insurers and have been rising for decades.


"It's always been a house of cards, and what blew it down was a virus," added Markel.


He is employed by the university's medical school which is not paying contributions into employee's retirement accounts for a period of one year starting July.


- Stimulus falls short -


The American Hospital Association has estimated that losses across the sector for the March-June period will be $200 billion.


The organization predicts that reimbursements for COVID-19 patients, as well as $100 billion set aside for hospitals as part of a federal stimulus package, will be insufficient to cover the costs -- which can exceed $80,000 for patients on ventilators, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation.


Beyond hospitals, other parts of the medical system have shut down entirely during the lockdown.
Dentists' offices have lost 500,000 jobs in one month, according to official statistics. Optometrists and physiotherapists have been similarly affected.


Even in New York, pulmonologists closed their offices. Doctor Len Horovitz, who is also an internist and runs a small practice with two employees, stopped everything for five weeks.


"It was about the third week in March when the phone stopped ringing -- it was like a neutron bomb had gone off," he said.


He has since re-opened, initially for telemedicine and now other consultations -- with many of his patients coming in for COVID-19 antibody testing.



https://www.yahoo.com/news/height-pa...200306639.html