Another way to prevent the health care system from being overwhelmed is to increase the number of doctors and other health care workers. Immigration has already increased the supply of health care workers in the United States and can do a lot more going forward. A new bill called the Healthcare Workforce Resilience Act, introduced by Senators David Perdue (R‑GA), Dick Durbin (D‑IL), Todd Young (R‑IN), and Chris Coons (D‑DE), would help increase the supply of health care workers further. It would recapture 40,000 unused employment-based green cards for health care workers—25,000 for nurses and 15,000 for physicians—and recapture an additional 160,000 unused green cards for their family members. The Healthcare Workforce Resilience Act is a step in the right direction and it’s bipartisan to boot.
Immigrants are overrepresented in health care in the United States overall and in most states. In 2018, immigrants were 16.3 percent of the U.S. population that was at least 16 years old and were 17.3 percent of all health care workers, as defined in this blog post. Without their contributions, the United States would be much less well prepared for the pandemic.