Lt. Gov. Sara Rodriguez said that with a new Legislature coming into office in January, elected under Wisconsin’s new voting maps, she believes legislators will show more flexibility in considering whether Wisconsin should be the last state to accept the federal Medicaid expansion. Dr. Nathan Grunewald, a urologist who grew up in Sauk County and returned to practice at Sauk Prairie Health Care, speaks with Rodriguez about concerns relating to recruiting and keeping health care workers in January. (Erik Gunn | Wisconsin Examiner)
Gov. Tony Evers’ Task Force on Healthcare Workforce released its recommendations Monday for addressing challenges with the state’s health care workforce now and in the coming years. The recommendations of the task force sought to address three issue areas: education and training; recruitment and retention; and regulatory policy.
Evers formed the task force in January after declaring 2024 the Year of the Worker in his State of the State. The 25-member group of cabinet officials and health care experts were given the job of developing proposals to help shape the health care and workforce agendas for the state’s 2025-27 budget.
“Wisconsin has seen historically low unemployment and a record-high number of Wisconsinites employed, but Wisconsin’s decade-long struggle to retain, attract, and train talented workers to address our workforce shortages in key industries continues to hold our state back,” Evers said in a statement. “This action plan will help bring more folks into the healthcare profession and ensure that Wisconsinites get the care they need and the quality of life they deserve.”
Evers said that ensuring the workforce can meet the needs of the economy is one of his top priorities and it “must be a top priority for our state, including the State Legislature.”
“I look forward to working together and considering these recommendations in the next biennial budget,” Evers said in a statement.
Task force chair Lt. Gov. Sara Rodriguez, who worked as an emergency room nurse and in health care policy and public health before entering politics, noted at a press conference that Wisconsin could face a shortage of 20,000 nurses by 2040 and that other roles in the industry are also facing shortages.
“That includes licensed practical nurses, surgical techs, all of these other support type of roles that it’s really important that they are also being filled so that clinicians such as nurses and physicians… can be able to do their job,” Rodriguez said. “That’s where we started from in the beginning and then looked at what were some of the core areas that we would want to improve within Wisconsin.”
Within education and training, the report recommends improving support for faculty who teach health professions by expanding incentive programs for health profession educators and increasing compensation for health professions faculty, strengthening clinical training and experience, reducing barriers to training, expanding apprenticeships and other learning opportunities, providing additional state funding for apprenticeship programs, funding the Worker Advancement Initiative Grant and increasing student access to health science and dual enrollment, which lets high school students complete post-secondary coursework and earn certifications and licenses.
Rodriguez said she thinks the state Legislature will want to take the initiative in launching apprenticeship models for education for clinicians.
“We were one of the first states to do that within UW Health with nurses, where they are taking their certified nursing assistants, paying them full-time wages, full-time benefits, paying for their tuition for school and they are going to be able to graduate with their registered nursing degree with no debt,” Rodriguez said. “That’s just a really fantastic, innovative way that we can take that apprenticeship model that Wisconsin has always been forward-facing on and be able to apply it to the health care workforce.”
The report provides three recommendations to improve recruitment and retention.
One proposal includes increasing support for recruitment and retention by expanding Medicaid to support health care workers and fund workforce initiatives. Part of the proposal would support rate increases to pay more for care for Wisconsinites who are elderly or disabled and for the behavioral health workforce. Another proposal expands state incentives, including loan repayments, housing supports and provider stipends, for health professionals serving in state-defined shortage areas. The final proposals would seek to support regional innovation through grants.
The task force also recommended expanding pathways to licensures by authorizing Medicaid reimbursements for doulas, community health workers, peer specialists and other community-focused providers, ratifying and entering into multi-state licensing compacts, opening pathways to licensure for qualified, internationally educated professionals and revising faculty educational requirements. It also recommends increasing health care workforce wellness programming.
Rodriguez said the state’s budget surplus creates the opportunity to help fund some of the recommendations. “If we do this, we are going to have an economy that is going to be working for everybody,” she said.
Rodriguez said the recommendations would go to Evers for consideration in the state budget and to the state budget office, which will create a fiscal estimate for each recommendation. She also noted that Medicaid expansion could help pay for the proposals.
The state could bring in $1.6 billion in federal funds by accepting federal Medicaid expansion funds, something the Legislature has so far refused to do.
“One of the recommendations we have in there is to expand Medicaid for the state of Wisconsin. We are now only one of 10 states that has not expanded Medicaid and we have the unique distinction of actually being able to save just on our general budget if we would expand … ,” Rodriguez said. “We are looking at not only items that may have a fiscal load attached, but there’s a lot of revenue that could come out of expanding Medicaid in Wisconsin that we can invest back into our workforce and within the health care system.”
Republicans in the Legislature have blocked Wisconsin from accepting the federal Medicaid expansion, despite Evers’ push to take the federal funds since he first took office in 2019. In total, Wisconsin would get $1.6 billion in federal funding over the next two years by lifting the cap on Medicaid coverage to 138% of the poverty level.
Rodriguez said that with a new Legislature coming into office in January, elected under Wisconsin’s new voting maps, she believes legislators will show more flexibility in considering whether Wisconsin should be the last state to accept the federal Medicaid expansion.
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