Rodriguez promotes focus on increasing health care workers
Sasha Kozelka, Nicole Martin, Mark Willems, Sara Rodriguez, Chris Brophy, Samantha Donahue, Shanon Mergen and Geoff Mandala. Lieutenant Governor Sara Rodriguez visited Prairie du Chien on Feb. 25 and met with the Crossing Rivers Health Leadership Team as part of her work on the governor’s Task Force on Healthcare. (Photo submitted by Samuel Canney)
Lt. governor advocates for boosts in incentives for Wisconsin health care professionals
By Steve Van Kooten
On Feb. 25, Lieutenant Governor Sara Rodriguez traveled to Prairie du Chien to meet with healthcare providers and professionals.
“I had met with Crossing Rivers more than a year ago. I was working on a health care workforce task force, and I had done tours of different health care systems in different parts of the state to talk to them about what their needs were,” Rodriguez said.
The task force met with healthcare experts and leaders throughout the state of Wisconsin before delivering their report to Governor Tony Evers this past August.
Rodriguez said that she met with providers and professionals from different demographic areas, including rural portions of the state that do not have an expansive health care infrastructure in place for residents.
“Rural areas may have a different need than more urban areas, and different parts of the state may have different needs than other areas, so [we were] trying to make sure the recommendations we were putting together encompassed what all of Wisconsin was looking for in their health care workforce needs.
“What I’m hearing from rural health care providers is that they do need more support. They need more support on recruiting and retaining clinicians and physicians. We just talked about it today: they are struggling to find obstetricians and gynecologists in their area. They also want to make sure they are able to offer the type of care people in their areas need,” she said.
Rodriguez added that having enough professionals in Wisconsin may become a problem in the future, saying that the state is projected to be short approximately 20,000 nurses by 2040 due to an aging workforce, earlier-than-expected retirements and other factors.
“If we are unable to get some of these supports, what I’m hearing from rural Wisconsin is that they’re going to do the best that they can, but they are going to struggle to be able to serve people,” she said.
The task force adopted 10 recommendations and 26 action items. These recommendations helped Evers form his budget proposal.
The proposal includes the allocation of state funds for a wide swath of initiatives that can provide incentives for continued education and improved access to educational opportunities in the health care field, including tuition reimbursement programs for nurses, funding for the WisCaregiver Career program to address the shortage of certified nursing assistants and programs to support recruitment and training for family medicine practitioners, among many others.
Another initiative will try to keep health care educators in Wisconsin to help shape the next generation of professionals.
“The budget is going to be able to do a couple of things. One is to be able to support the people that are already here, and if individuals would like to move on to get a PhD to be able to teach the nurses of the future, we also know we have a shortage of those. If you are unaware of it, nurses are able to get their PhDs and have that funded through the state of Wisconsin as long as they agree to teach here for a period of time,” Rodriguez said.
State Senator Howard Marklein responded to Evers’ proposal, which he said increases the state’s budget by approximately $18.9 billion from the 2023–25 budget, adds hundreds of new positions to the state government and raises taxes by more than $2 billion.
“This proposal budget is a list of ideas. It is not the final state budget. The legislature will now work to write the final state budget,” Marklein wrote on Feb. 18.
Marklein claims that much of the state’s budget surplus is composed of one-time money, and the finance committee intends to commit those funds to “one-time costs,” including paying down debt and funding infrastructure, when crafting the state’s budget. He said that Evers’ initiatives will be “considered on their merit.”
According to Rodriguez, the incentives for health care professionals in the proposal could either end after the biennium or continue into future state budgets, but it will “depend on the needs of the state.”
“If we’re continuing to see that we need to be able to invest in our workforce, if we need to be able to make sure we are recruiting and retaining people here in Wisconsin, you may see this in the next budget that comes out,” she said.
Rodriguez continued, “We can put systems in place that we will be able to increase the number of people we have here, and then we can see what we need to do in the future. Maybe we want to pivot and do something else.”
Rodriguez encourages Wisconsin residents to make their opinion known when it comes to any aspect of the state’s budget.
“Talk to your representative and tell them how important it is to support health care in the state of Wisconsin.”
A 164-page brief of Evers’ budget proposal can be viewed at https://doa.wi.gov/budget/SBO/2025-27%20Budget%20in%20Brief%20UEK.pdf.
The full report and a report summary from the Task Force on Health Care are available at https://www.dhs.wisconsin.gov/hc-workforce/index.htm.
