Nurses have been complaining about this dynamic on social media for months now, as thousands of full-time nurses complain that they're bearing the brunt of staffing shortages while not being fairly compensated. But finally it appears the Washington Post has caught on, publishing a report on soaring demand for traveling nurses. As WaPo explains, if 2020 was the year travel nursing took off, with 35% growth over the pre-pandemic year of 2019, this year has propelled it to new heights, with an additional 40% growth expected. WaPo says it got its number from an "independent" analysis of the health-care workforce in the US.

Traveling nurses are a hot issue in the pandemic health-care scene in the US. As an aging, burned-out and retiring nurse workforce saw unprecedented rates of employees retiring after the 2020 horrorshow, the return of hospital services that were shut down last year and a shortage of foreign recruits and nursing students have combined to leave hospitals desperately short staffed on the nursing front.

"Of all the things that keep CEOs of hospitals up at night, this is the key one," said Chip Kahn, president and chief executive of the Federation of American Hospitals, which represents about 1,000 for-profit facilities.

Nurse unions insist that the staffing crisis in health care would end instantly if hospitals raised wages to attract more full-time staff. Instead, hospitals appear content paying workers a massive premium for short-term, ad hoc, arrangements. And it's not like demand for health-care is expected to drop off any time soon; most projections have demand growing exponentially over the coming decades.

One of the country's largest nursing unions went a step further and blamed hospitals for creating the staffing problem by trying to keep the number of full-time nurses as small as possible.