click to enlarge Nearly 200 federal lawmakers — including Rep. Peter Welch (D-Vt.) — are urging the White House to investigate agencies that employ travel nurses, suggesting that the “exorbitant” rates charged during much of the pandemic may amount to illegal price gouging.
The bipartisan group of lawmakers, led by Welch and Rep. Morgan Griffith (R-Va.), cited reports of travel nurse staffing agencies doubling or tripling their rates during the thorniest months of the pandemic in attempts to profit off the crisis.
In a letter to the White House COVID-19 Response Team, the lawmakers asked for a federal investigation of these price increases to determine whether they violate any anti-competitive or consumer protection laws.
“We urge you to ensure that this issue gets the attention from the federal government it merits to protect patients in dire need of life-saving health care treatment and prevent conduct that is exacerbating the shortage of nurses and straining the health care system," the lawmakers wrote.
Travel nurses, who typically move from state to state and work on short-term contracts, have long supplemented Vermont's health care workforce, but they've become
even more vital during the pandemic as chronic staffing shortages make it harder for hospitals to keep pace with demands for their services. Vermont hospitals now expect to spend $75 million on temporary workforces this fiscal year alone — far more than the average pre-pandemic year.
The largest of those bills comes from the University of Vermont Medical Center, where travel workers have constituted up to 15 percent of the nursing workforce at times.
The medical center typically paid travel agencies $75 to $85 an hour before the pandemic but told
Seven Days in November that the hourly rates had jumped to between $140 and $185. Those figures have climbed even higher during the Omicron surge; according to a spokesperson, the hospital is now coughing up hourly rates between $150 to $195.
Travel agencies take a cut of this money before passing it on to their clients, but the nurses still end up earning far more than permanent staff for the same work. That's convinced some permanent nurses to leave their jobs for travel work, while breeding resentment among many who stay.
UVM Health Network CEO and president John Brumsted called the price of travel workers "unsustainable" during a press conference last week and said that he supported a federal probe into the problem.
"Individual states have tried to do something about it, and they've been severely penalized by lack of access to travelers," Brumsted said. "So it clearly has to be a national approach."