Unethical prior authorization practices by insurance companies delay treatment and put patient health at risk. Treatment decisions should be between the patient and the healthcare provider without a bean counter's interference.

Staffing ratios are a matter of patient safety. Unsafe ratios put patients at risk and contribute to burnout. It's not acceptable for greedy administrators to put patients at risk as a cost-saving measure.

Patient surveys are damaging to both provider morale and patient care. They are often filled out only by those dissatisfied or with unrealistic expectations and have been shown to favor low quality care over evidence based medicine. They are now tied to reimbursement for Medicaid & Medicare and giving a false impression of quality of care. Administrators use them punitively rather than as a chance to improve processes, and healthcare workers get caught in the middle.

Clinicians, not corporations, should be the ones running healthcare in this country. Greed has turned our healthcare system into a money making machine for those at the top. It's time for leadership of healthcare to be returned to those who have the expertise and prioritize patients over profits.

Students in healthcare programs are being saddled with insurmountable debt. Our student loan programs must be reformed to decrease interest rates and offer manageable repayment plans.

Public service loan forgiveness should be protected, and qualifications for the National Health Service Corps loan repayment and scholarship programs should be expanded. The NHSC should be funded at a higher rate in order to assist more students in going into rural healthcare.

Often, the cost of application or a lack of knowledge of application requirements derails a student from pursuing healthcare as a career. Existing pipeline programs for students in high school and undergraduate programs should be expanded and new ones created to overcome these barriers.

Every healthcare educator knows that the rate limiting step for their program is the availability of clinical preceptors. Over time, greedy corporate run healthcare facilities have demanded payment for preceptors, although many of them precepted for free. Even now, many employers take the funds paid by the school and the individual preceptor never sees a dime of it. On top of that, the need to pay for precepting increases the overall cost of the student's education, and ultimately student loan burdens.

Preceptors should have a guarantee of being paid if their employer is receiving a fee for their work. Healthcare programs should receive funding assistance for preceptor fees in order to avoid passing all of that cost onto the student. A national preceptor database should be created to cut down on the hours of work it takes to identify available preceptors, with participation in this database making preceptors eligible for tax incentives. Classroom educators and clinical preceptors should be eligible for student loan forgiveness after a predetermined length of service, and healthcare educator pay should be increased so that clinicians don't have to take an unmanageable pay cut to enter education.