This odd belief system that the republicans are responsible for the ACA clusterfuck.

[Warpy]

157. They all closed their urgent care centers here

I don't know where they're expecting insured patients to go for routine things, I haven't had insurance since 1987. I suppose acutely ill people need to get by the dragon at the front desk to see a doc at his office or go to the more profitable ER and clog that up with non emergency illness and accident.

10 years ago there were two pages of ads for nurses in the local paper. Last week there wasn't a single one. You'd think nurses weren't needed any more.

In addition, the average age of bedside nurses has been going up for decades as the bottleneck at the educational level gets more acute. Masters and PhD prepared nurses make much more in practice than they do as educators. Most can't really afford to throw themselves on the altar of self sacrifice to educate new nurses. Admission is therefore extremely competitive and schools haven't been able to graduate enough nurses to fill the need for many years.

The only thing that has changed is that new nurses aren't being hired and experienced nurses are having trouble finding jobs. I can only conclude (since there aren't any fewer patients) that hospitals have instituted Draconian hiring freezes because they're frightened of the ACA.

The hiring freeze is nation wide. The closing of urgent care centers is local. Both are caused by scared little rabbits in administration who believe all the doom and gloom coming out of Republican news sources that tell them they'll all be wearing barrels and selling pencils on street corners for revenue after January first.