Political Quotes

“I would request the Chair to inform me when I have used 6 minutes of the 10 minutes I have requested. We have a lot of bipartisan battles in the Senate. I am going to try to bring an issue to the consideration of the Senate and to their attention which I believe is very bipartisan. It affects the State of Alaska, the State of North Dakota, the State of Illinois, and the State of Maine. It affects us all. What I am speaking to is the shortage of nurses in America. We face a critical shortage of nurses. The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services looked at all of the licensed nurses and found that in the year 2000, this country was 110,000 nurses short of what was necessary to provide adequate health care. By 2005, the shortage had doubled to 219,000 nurses. By 2020, we will be more than 1 million nurses short of what is necessary to maintain quality health care in America. To avoid this shortage which the Department of Health and Human Services projects, we have to substantially increase the number of nursing graduates and those entering the workforce each year. Just to replace the nurses who are retiring, we need to increase student enrollment by at least 40 percent. The baseline supply for nurses--as you can see on this chart--in our country, for the current time and through the year 2020, is on a steady downward flow, whereas demand goes up dramatically.…”