Neighbor News
🚨 Long Beach Alert: A Nursing Shortage & Childcare Crisis Are Being Engineered
Nurse shortages & daycare closures: How the OBBBA hits Long Beach. Join the Feb 27 AAUW Bus Tour and listen to the podcast for receipts!
Long Beach, I’ve been doing the research, and the "receipts" I’ve found for our city are chilling. In this solo episode of the Girls Gone Menopause Podcast, I am breaking down how the One Big Beautiful Bill (OBBBA) is doomed to create a nursing and child care shortage right here in our neighborhood.
The Long Beach Domino Effect:
- The CSULB Crisis: Over 70% of students at Cal State Long Beach rely on financial aid. By slashing loan limits for nursing and education, this bill is pricing our local students out of the workforce before they even start.
- The Nursing Shortage: This directly leads to a staff shortage at the Long Beach VA and our local hospitals. We aren't just losing degrees; we are losing the people who care for our veterans and families.
- The Non-Profit Trap: For the few who do graduate, new rules are de-incentivizing them from working at our local non-profits—like St. Mary’s—by threatening their loan forgiveness.
- The Childcare Collapse: This is the part that hits home. A federal funding freeze on childcare vouchers is threatening the 280 licensed providers in Long Beach. In North and West Long Beach, where providers rely on these vouchers for up to 60% of their revenue, we could see 30% of our home-based daycares close within 60 days. *
Why We Must Connect Past to Present:
This is exactly why the AAUW Long Beach Suffragist History Bus Tour on February 27th is so vital. We need to look at how the women of Long Beach organized 100 years ago to find our strategy for today. I’m urging you to take the young women in your life on this tour—knowing our history is how we galvanize our future.
🎧 LISTEN TO THE EPISODE ABOVE FOR THE FULL "RECEIPTS" & BUS TOUR DETAILS:
