It's Veterans Day. Your feed is a wall of flags and "thank you for your service." Mine too. Here's a thought that lands worse than the flags: the fastest fix for the clinician shortage is sitting in that feed, and we are the ones blocking it.
We don't have a clinician shortage. We have a licensing problem wearing a shortage costume.
Every year thousands of medics and corpsmen leave the military. They ran trauma bays, started IVs under fire, managed sick call for a battalion, held someone together on a helicopter. Then they come home, walk into a civilian health system, and get told they qualify to be a medical assistant. Maybe a phlebotomist. Start over. Go get the two-year degree. We'll keep your résumé on file.
I don't have the exact number who separate each year and I'd verify it before quoting it, but it runs into the tens of thousands. That's a standing army of trained clinical talent, and we retrain it down to entry level or lose it to insurance call centers. We do this while every health system CEO in the country stands on a stage and says the one thing they can't solve is the workforce.
Read that again. We say the constraint is people. We have the people. We built the wall ourselves.
Washington finally noticed. Senators Mark Kelly and Mike Rounds introduced the MEDIC Act, S. 2673, the Medic Education and Deployment Into Civilian Careers Act, a bipartisan bill to turn military medical training into civilian credentials. Bipartisan, in a year when nothing is. States moved first. Massachusetts stood up a program to route military medics into hospital roles. Pennsylvania is looking hard at primary care medics for rural counties where the nearest doctor is an hour away. Texas has its own version in motion. Becker's ran a piece this fall on two health systems that stopped waiting for permission and built veteran hiring pipelines to fill provider gaps.
So the sharp operators are already moving. Good. Everyone else is still writing checks to locum agencies and wondering why the margin is upside down.
Here's where I'll get myself in trouble. The resistance to this isn't about safety. It's about turf. A combat medic who has intubated more patients than a new grad has met is somehow "not qualified" for a scope that graduate walks into on day one with zero patient contact. That's not a clinical judgment. It's a guild judgment. We dress it up as patient protection because "we'd rather protect the credential monopoly" doesn't poll well.
Before anyone emails me: I'm not saying hand a corpsman an unsupervised panel of brittle diabetics and walk away. I'm saying the gap between what these people can safely do and what we allow them to do is enormous, and we pay for that gap every day in burnout and overtime.
Now the part that matters if you run a risk contract or you're trying to make a home-based program pencil out.
The reason most practices tell me they can't push care into the home, can't do real preventative outreach, can't run between-visit programs at any scale, is always the same. They can't staff it. The clinical labor is too scarce and too expensive. Every model dies on the labor line.
Veterans break that math. A medic is built for this exact work. Protocol-driven. Steady when things go sideways. Trained to assess and escalate without a physician hovering over every decision. That is the whole job in home-based and virtual care. It's pattern recognition and knowing the one case out of forty that needs a doctor right now. The military spent years and real money teaching people to do that under conditions none of us will ever see. We leave that investment on the floor.
At Welby we run the care between visits for primary care practices. The model lives or dies on clinical labor that is high quality and affordable enough to work across fee-for-service and risk. The veteran clinical workforce is one of the few talent pools that clears both bars. If your home-based or preventative program keeps dying on the labor line, you are overlooking the most obvious hire in American healthcare.
So what do you do Monday morning, not next quarter.
Call your talent lead and ask one question. How many veterans with a medical specialty applied here last year, and what happened to them. I'll bet money the answer is "a lot applied, and we funneled them into MA roles or passed." Fix that. Build a real pathway that maps a 68W or a hospital corpsman rating to the highest scope your state and your malpractice carrier will allow, with a supervising physician and a clean escalation path. Call the nearest base or VA transition office. Stop treating military experience as a line you nod at and start treating it as a sourcing channel.
If your state already passed a medic-to-civilian pathway, you have no excuse left. The law is handing you labor. Take it.
The flags come down tonight. The shortage you keep complaining about will still be here tomorrow, and so will the people who could end it, still standing outside the room waiting for us to let them in. Thank them for their service by giving them the work they already know how to do.
