By: Emily Beaver

Dylan Marriner, a 21-year-old from Woburn, Massachusetts, spends five days a week caring for a man with spinal muscular atrophy type 2. Because of his muscular atrophy, the man can't move his arms or legs. As a personal care attendant, Marriner helps him with tasks like washing his hair, brushing his teeth, and using a computer.

Even though Marriner has worked in health care full time for more than two years, his job doesn't come with health insurance. He is directly employed by the man he cares for and is paid through the man's insurance. Marriner says he is covered under his mother's health insurance plan now, but when he turns 22 in April, he'll be on his own.

Marriner is one of about 3 million Americans who work as direct care workers, a term for a variety of health care workers who mostly care for people who are elderly or have disabilities. Almost one-third of direct care workers don't have health insurance, according to the Paraprofessional Healthcare Institute (PHI), an organization that aims to improve residential and home health care by improving working conditions for direct care workers.

As an aspiring nurse, I was happy to hear about the Senate Finance Committee’s approval of a health care bill aimed at covering about 94% of Americans. With that many people getting medical care, you’d think the government would have thought about the workforce necessary to give that care.

Apparently it hasn’t.

The current health care bill doesn’t address the shortage in health care workers, especially primary care physicians. That affects nurses too because the more patients there are, the more doctors are needed. And the more nurses are necessary to support those doctors.

But even without an increase in patients, there’s already a nursing shortage.  I’m worried because once I become a nurse, I don’t want there to be too few healthcare workers to care for all the sick people. Patients will suffer and the doctors and nurses will get overworked.