Shiny Chandravel, Assistant Opinions Editor
If you want to fully understand the health care crisis, don’t look at the trauma bay — look at the waiting room.
I work as a patient care technician in an emergency room, assisting nurses with labs, IV lines, patient care and flow of the floor. Yet, the most stressful part isn’t at the patient’s bedside, it’s behind the front desk of the waiting room, deciding who can afford to wait. It’s weighing the feverish baby against the grandpa with chest pain.
As more critical patients arrive, rooms become scarce. Patients are seen spilling into hallways, chairs and eventually, as a last-ditch effort, the waiting room.
As a tech, I once helped a patient who had been in the emergency room for 16 hours. He was angry, and understandably so. His story was not unfamiliar, but what stood out the most to me was what he said.
“The nurses just want to keep me waiting long enough so they get paid more. I know how these games work,” he said.
I immediately became angry — not at him, but at how wrong, yet widely-held that belief is. As daunting as it feels to be a patient watching the clock tick, you aren’t alone — the nurses feel it too.
They feel it in the minutes before an ambulance arrives, knowing the room they need doesn’t exist.
They feel it in the seconds after the time of death is called, before they’re rushed to move on to a different patient.
They feel it in the time it takes to answer every beeping call bell, alarm and monitor.
They feel it because time isn’t something nurses can sit with. It’s something they are required to manage, ration and borrow every single day. The ticking time bomb that is a fragile emergency room has little to do with bad nurses — but the scarcity of any.
The nursing shortage crisis has existed since World War II, and has only been strained further by the COVID-19 pandemic, the retirement wave of the Baby Boomer generation and poor workplace retention.
Sadly, as the consequences of the shortage grow dire, recent federal policy has only made it more bleak.
Abiding by plans laid out in President Donald Trump’s “One Big, Beautiful Bill,” the Department of Education has cut loan access significantly. Previously, any graduate student was able to qualify for loans equivalent to the cost of their degree. However, the standards have since changed.
New rules, effective July 1, 2026, limit the amount of the loans graduate students can take depending on whether their degree is considered “graduate” or “professional.” The “professional” degree programs have been limited to fields such as medicine, law, dentistry, pharmacy and even theology.
This proposal has garnered extensive criticism and fear as it has notably excluded nursing, physical therapy, dental hygiene, occupational therapy and social work, as well as architecture, education and accounting. Many have recognized the disproportionate effect this will have on our middle-class and female-dominated professions.
Professional degrees now have loan caps of $50,000 per year with a lifetime maximum of $200,000. Any degree not on this list is considered a graduate degree with a loan cap of $20,500 per year with a lifetime maximum of $100,000.
These caps fall short of covering tuition for lower-income students, effectively shutting out many from pursuing essential careers. The American Association of Colleges of Nursing stated the impact of the proposal “on our already-challenged nursing workforce would be devastating.”
It’s important to understand the Department of Education’s proposed reasoning.
The Education Department’s website — under the Trump administration — now argues capping federal tuition loans will ultimately lower tuition costs, referencing the 1984 Bennett Hypothesis. The theory proposes that large student loans enable colleges to raise tuition.
However, the Bennett Hypothesis has a contentious reputation. The Center for American Progress identified that college tuition continued to increase despite consistent loan limits, attributing the increase to state funding cuts.
A 2003 University of Oregon study showed the effect only really applied to private, elite, small colleges.
Ultimately, in 2014, a bipartisan Congressional Research Service study concluded the hypothesis remained unsubstantiated due to inconsistent findings within studies.
There are those in our generation willing to fill in the massive shoes left by our health care shortage.
Today, there are nearly 1,000 students enrolled in the VCU School of Nursing. These students — our peers and future health care professionals — deserve our support. The Department of Education’s policy only creates more barriers in the meantime.
The price of the policy will not solely be paid by nursing students drowning in debt. It is a price we will all share when it’s our turn to wait in a congested emergency room.
It won’t be because nurses failed to show up, but because we pulled the rug from underneath them before they could even try.