The Las Vegas Review Journal reports that the public is paying $2 million a month to provide dialysis and other treatment to illegally present immigrants at University Medical Center. The cost includes providing dialysis to more than 80 such patients.

The New York Times reports that the very popular program to provide citizenship to foreign doctors and nurses has stopped accepting applications. The program, which also includes translators as well as health professionals, is set to expire next month after its initial pilot year of operation and an extension depends on completion of a review of the program by the Pentagon. Called MAVNI - Military Accessions Vital to National Interest - the program has been seen as a major success with more than 1,000 applications approved, several hundred in the pipeline and more than 14,000 inquiries received. While extension is seen as likely, there is no news yet on when that will happen.

From the Atlanta Journal-Constitution:

An international human rights organization is reviewing whether Grady Memorial Hospital violated the rights of patients of its now-closed outpatients dialysis clinic.

The Inter-American Commission on Human Rights has asked the U.S. government to respond to accusations by the patients' attorneys, who assert that the hospital violated the patients rights to life and well-being. The approximately 50 patients are virtually all poor illegal immigrants who paid nothing for their treatments.

The attorneys want the commission to advocate that the patients continue to receive treatment -- at the hospital's expense -- beyond Grady's Feb. 3 deadline to stop care.

The attorneys also want the patients to receive this care until their legal challenge works its way through the courts.

I've recently blogged about the controversy surrounding Atlanta's Grady Hospital and its decision to shut down dialysis services used by illegally present immigrants. Now a Miami hospital is facing a similar decision, as the NY Times reports.

Certain voices in the nursing community are trying to make the argument that there is no nursing shortage and we need to keep protectionist policies in place. But there has been a great deal compelling evidence pointing in only one direction for many years - a nurse shortage that is already bad and will grow much worse in decades to come. Here's an article from CNN/Money that is certainly scary.

And 30 million more patients are about to gain access to health care under the reform bill on the verge of passage in Congress. If we don't have enough nurses to treat today's patients, how will we deal with an expansion of such a large magnitude.

It's time to face the music and admit that we need foreign nurses to at least help us fill the gaps while we make serious investments in the nurse education infrastructure so we can eventually have enough American-born nurses.

A court has dismissed a lawsuit challenging the closure of the Grady Hospital renal clinic. The clinic serves a population of illegally present immigrants and there are fears that needed dialysis treatments will go undelivered as a result of the shutdown. Grady has been paying for three months of treatments at private clinics, but that time is about to end. The lawyer for the patients has promised to appeal.

Congress is about to dramatically increase demand for doctors, but is still doing little about the supply of doctors (including reforming physician immigration rules that encourage American-trained doctors to leave).

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