Iowa House backs pay caps for traveling nurses

No, it didn't.

 

"The Romney campaign has gone on the offense on Medicare, charging that the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) "cuts $716 billion" from the entitlement program. ...
The majority of the cuts, as you can see in this chart below, come from reductions in how much Medicare reimburses hospitals and private health insurance companies."​

source: Romney’s right: Obamacare cuts Medicare by $716 billion. Here's how. Sarah Kliff, Washington Post, Aug 14, 2012

 

I don't disagree with your post but paying traveling nurses more than permanent nurses encourages those permanent nurses to leave and become traveling nurses and often end up working in the same place. The NHS in the UK is collapsing because of this run away effect as the public are being held to ransom.

 

Couple of things.

First, just to let you know there are trade schools that offer both CNA and RN education, some of which are even free. Like LINK: Job Corps | Careers Begin Here (I went to Job Corps myself). So there is no shortage of affordable education available. The problem is that too many people think that you HAVE to go do college in order to get such an education, when you really don't. That is due in large part to government promoting college/university education for decades and ignoring trade skill education.

And I think that one of the reasons that hospitals have such a shortage of nurses might be due to the free market taking nurses away from hospitals through higher pay. That might be the reasoning for the bill in the OP. Maybe try and get it more in line with what hospitals pay so that nurses aren't so inclined to leave a hospital with the allure of higher pay. (something I can't blame them for). At least that is the only thing I can think of.

Who knows, maybe Conservatives have realized the same thing that I realized a long time ago. That eventually we're going to HAVE to have some sort of pay cap in order to stop rising prices. If all you ever do is raise the minimum wage, then prices will always go up. But with a pay cap you won't need to raise minimum wage, and prices will not increase. You need a mixture of the two. Not just one or the other. Of course this would also have to be implemented on far more than a local level, and quite possibly even an international level for it to really work. Otherwise people will just move to an area that doesn't have such caps and the whole thing will be doomed to fail. The problem being of course that the elite will never allow for such, as such, its doomed to fail either way.

 

The ACA's Medicare savings, while hugely important and successful (and in fact even larger than the number you're citing here), were relative to the no-ACA baseline, they weren't year-over-year price reductions and they didn't lead to pay cuts for nurses.