Tim Ryan: “There is no question, and the more you get into this, the more you see, and again it is not that government is the only…”

“There is no question, and the more you get into this, the more you see, and again it is not that government is the only answer, but I will give you an example. We had today in our Health Appropriations Committee, there is a tremendous nursing shortage, health care shortage, and there are some programs that will help nurses with low-interest loans. If you are going to go into nursing, you get these low-interest loans to try to get minority and low-income nurses and health care workers into the field. So there is another program that will go in and try to recruit and get people in and help them pay for it in order for us to get nurses and health care workers in the underserved areas. That program, I think this is the one that was zeroed out by the President in his budget. Now, does that make any sense at all? We have a nursing shortage, and we have tremendous health issues for our kids and poor families that we need. As I said earlier, we have only got 300 million people. We need them all on the field playing against China and India, that we are not going to make this little bit of investment into making sure that we get health care workers in underserved areas? The health care system is already getting skewed to the suburbs where a lot of these health care systems can make money in the suburbs, and the level of charity care in the cities are going through the roof.”