Most nurses also don’t have the time. It’s usually nursing assistants bringing you ice chips. Nurses do a lot of what many people might imagine to be a doctor’s purview, or for which they might not realize the complexity and importance. E.g., it’s not a doctor carefully cleaning and dressing your wounds so that you don’t develop a systemic infection, nor is the doctor watching your vital signs or adjusting intravenous medication infusion rates while your organs balance on a knife’s edge, nor is it a doctor who pumps you full of epinephrine to restart your heart after you’ve slipped off the mortal coil. Doctors diagnose and order the treatment, but nurses carry it out, and that too requires specialized knowledge and skills which necessitate intensive education. Ask any nurse, and they’ll tell you that nursing school was one of the hardest experiences of their life.

But that’s all kind of irrelevant to the issue, which is loan eligibility for graduate-level education for nurses. That is, for roles like nurse practitioners and nurse anesthetists, whose job functions and responsibilities significantly overlap with those of medical doctors. Much of the conversation in this thread, and the article itself, confuses that. Associate and bachelor level nursing degrees (the degrees held by most nurses, and the nurses doing the bedside care) weren’t eligible for the loans this rule impacts in the first place.