I've got a nurse friend with significant autoimmune issues who can't quit her job because she needs the health insurance - she works in the ER of a rural hospital in the Midwest making ~$45k/year. She's absolutely inundated with Covid patients right now and is risking her life every minute that she spends there.

Some random traveling medical professionals making good money in no way absolves the rest of the country's apathy toward this scourge.

Nothing to do with nursing per-se, but de-coupling employment from health insurance would be a good thing. I realize that there are lots of other complicated issues with regard to health care and health insurance but I can't think of any other service that is so tightly coupled to your employer.

Some reading: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK235989/

Yep, 100% agree.

If you've ever worked in a small organization (~50 employees), it's amazing how much money, time and energy is spend on health insurance. Every single HR person in the country needs to be an expert on these esoteric insurance edges or you get taken for a ride and your employees and balance sheet suffer.

Physicians do.

I'm not 100% sure of this, but I think physicians are very much the minority of healthcare providers. I think it's one physician per many nurse, CNA, PT, OT, ST, etc. Specifically because docs are so expensive.