The final rule from the Department of Education leaves behind some of the most critical contributors to America’s healthcare workforce — and the patients who depend on them will feel the consequences.
By excluding nursing, physical therapy, occupational therapy, and physician assistant programs from the ‘professional’ borrowing category, the administration has drawn an arbitrary line that does not reflect the realities of healthcare workforce training, program costs, or the essential roles these clinicians play in communities across the country. These are not peripheral professions. They are the backbone of primary care, rehabilitation, long-term care, and preventive medicine — and the United States already faces severe and well-documented shortages in every one of them.
At TruMerit, we work at the intersection of global healthcare workforce development and U.S. patient care needs. We understand that no single pipeline — domestic or international — can alone address the scale of this shortage. The United States needs both. We need to be training and retaining more domestic graduates in nursing and allied health fields, and we need smart, efficient pathways for internationally educated healthcare professionals to bring their skills to underserved communities here at home.
Artificially limiting access to federal loans for domestic nursing and allied health students will reduce the number of American-trained clinicians entering the workforce precisely when demand is surging. Older adults, rural communities, and low-income populations — those with the least access to care — will bear the greatest burden of that shortage. At the same time, U.S. immigration and credentialing policy continues to create bottlenecks that slow or block internationally educated professionals from filling the gaps.
We urge Congress to act. The exclusion of nursing, PT, OT, and PA programs from ‘professional’ borrowing limits was bad policy if expanding access to care is the goal. Correcting it is not a question of ideology — it is a question of whether Americans will have access to the care they need, wherever they live and wherever their providers were trained.
Peter Preziosi,
President & CEO, TruMerit