Travel Nurses Brace for Investigation Into High Pay

Anyone who has worked in the medical staffing industry in the last few years has seen how much nursing pay has grown. It’s particularly lucrative for nurses who are willing to travel.

Because of Covid, Travel Nurses are seeing salaries that have doubled and tripled. Rates of $150 an hour are being discussed, along with tax free benefits that draw nurses away from staff roles and into the lifestyle of a traveler.

The debate surrounding travel nursing has been going on for years. A quick recap is in order before we jump into the latest drama.

Why Are Travel Nurses Paid So High

Hospitals oftentimes need to hire more nurses for temporary assignments. They might see an increase in need for a few months due to staff shortage, call outs, increased population in their hospitals, or any other number of reasons.

Instead of spending the money to hire full time staff nurses, hospitals go the traveler route. It’s cheaper, but more importantly it’s easier.

The main headache when dealing with nursing staff is to get them to commit. Because they are in such high demand , there is a great deal of legwork involved in recruiting them, credentialing them, running background checks, and all other issues associated with onboarding and hiring new staff for a hospital.

Hospital administrators are not skilled enough to handle the fast paced nature of this process. So, they pay a premium to outsource the work to agencies.

In order to draw nurses from around the country, they also pay these travel nurses significantly more money then their own staff. This causes terrible tension, which as any travel nurse would tell you results in staff RNs doing less work and off-loading it to the travelers.

Nurse unions are strong, and so staff RNs are often in position where they are at odds with travelers. As many travelers will tell you, they are given the hardest patients, the least assistance, and the most headaches from staff nurses.

So, to draw these nurses, hospitals need to pay exorbitant salaries. And they do.

Why Pays For This?

One of the big changes in travel nursing came about with the passage of the ACA, or affordable care act. Hospitals were now charged with bring in more nurses. This was seen as beneficial to patients, but it also caused a dearth of nurses for hospitals.

Nurses were now in high demand. Small hospitals, mostly private, are unable to contract out for travelers due to funding issues.

Public hospitals and many Non-Profit affiliated hospitals and clinics though were able to tie into major sources of public funding. Billions in tax money, essentially, is flowing into the hospitals.

Nurses will point out that hospital CEOs and Administrators are all making mid-six figures, which is accurate in most markets. However, the average nurse makes more now than a lawyer or software engineer.

In addition to the enormous amounts of money being poured into healthcare by the government, insurance premiums have risen. Again, this can’t be tied to only the cost of nursing, as hospitals have at the same time began to aggressively bill and raise the cost of all procedures. But the trillion dollar insurance industry is there to support it.

They’re Paid How Much?

One of the shocking things to people not familiar with nursing is how much they are paid. Nursing is now one of the highest paid entry level jobs in the market.

A nurse with a single years experience can make 100k virtually anywhere in the country. There are few if any roles outside of I-Banking where that’s possible. The legion of people who graduate with degrees in software design hope to land these roles, but they are super competitive.

Compare the pay for Social Workers and case workers in areas like California. These are difficult roles as well, and require degrees in social services, but these jobs are paying significantly less.

Nursing has the advantage of having no competition. Nurses do not work for private industry. They are all working, in one way or another, for publicly funded hospitals. Medicaid, Medicare, and government mandated insurance is now funding the enormous salaries of Nurses and hospital executives and staff.

The general public had little knowledge of how much nurses were paid. However, nurses began flaunting their paychecks on Instagram, and other social media, and soon it became someone known to outsiders.

In the past, nurses and their families knew how lucrative it was, which was why you would see so many nurses related to one another—it’s an easy to get job and the pay is amazing, so once a person became a nurse they tended to have many relatives also become nurses.

As a note, nurses who might be reading this would take umbrage at the clarification of their job as easy. And they are correct. It’s dirty work. You are dealing with unpleasant patients, hostile employees, difficult work conditions and long hours. Which is true.

However, the barrier to entry is low, which makes it appealing to many. Unlike many careers, you are virtually guaranteed a job with a flexible schedule as soon as you have a license.

Publicly Funded Salaries- Outrage Over Nursing Salaries

One of the reasons that this is now getting press is that so many people have lost work during the pandemic. Retail workers, office workers, and regular people were put out of work. The government sent out small checks, but it was paltry when compared to what they had been making.

The people who profited most were businesses who were able to file for PPP Loans (executives and business owners who made millions of dollars).

While nurses were not the executives who could claim to need millions individually, they did suddenly see their hourly rates rise.

As people around the country grow restless about loss of income, work restrictions, and endless news coverage, there is also growing discussion over the incredibly pay that travel nurses are making.

When your average office worker or retail worker who has been forced out of work sees videos online of Nurses making TikTok dance videos, or waving in parades, or doing other non-essential work, they do wonder about these individuals making $150 an hour and in many cases ten thousand dollars a week for.

Not only that, but many stories have covered nurses quitting their staff jobs to travel. So, the hospitals are filled with travelers all working each others jobs, costing the tax payers hundreds of millions.

This has caused the travel nurse pay cap to be discussed. And of course that is a topic that has outraged and concerned many travel nurses. Rightfully so. Travel nurses who are making ten thousand dollars a week do not want to have that salary reduced. They are in many cases supporting family (adult children or spouses) and have created a lifestyle that would be drastically reduced in quality.

There are stories regarding investigations being initiated at the government level. Politicians are allegedly concerned over the out of control salary’s which were for some time not widespread outside of the nursing community.

Nurses Threaten To Quit

If you read nurse blogs and forums you will see that nurses are incensed that their pay might decrease.

They have for years worked hard to get some of the highest pay in the country. Enormous energy spent on public relations and one of the strongest unions in existence has helped.

Many travel nurses have said they will quit doing travel if there is a pay cap. Their legitimate complaint is that the hundreds of millions being directed to hospitals won’t change, all that will change is that the CEOs and administrators will benefit more directly and not the working staff.

And they have a point. The board and administrators in charge of the nations hospitals are for the most part all millionaires. In every large city around the country, those who run hospitals are some of the highest paid workers in the area.

The nurses are the ones doing the legwork, and if it weren’t for the nurses, the hospital would not be able to bill the government millions upon millions of dollars.

So, it seems greedy to cap nurse pay.

Likely Outcome?

The likely outcome is that for the foreseeable future travel pay won’t be capped. It’s too hot an issue. What is more likely is that rates will simply drop. Less people being admitted to the hospital will mean less of a need for nurses.

When there is a glut of nurses available there is less of a need to pay them as much. This, coupled with the influx every year of more and more nurses is going to level off the pay rate.

Every year thousands of new nurses are licensed and move into the workforce. The field is growing thanks to positive word of mouth in the nursing community. It’s standard for nurses to come from families where multiple people are nurses.

So, it’s simply a law of economics. The more nurses available, the lower their rate will be. However, that will take years to come into play.