Hueman RPO

The instinctive response to vacancy spikes is familiar: open a travel contract, call an agency, authorize overtime.

It fills the shift. It satisfies the immediate pressure. And 54% of healthcare facilities are doing it on a chronic, weekly basis — not as a contingency, but as infrastructure.

The Medicaid cuts don't create that dependency. They just make it impossible to keep absorbing the cost.

We broke down what the alternative looks like - https://hubs.ly/Q04cTyzT0

Three labor and delivery units closed across three states in 90 days — November 2025 through January 2026. Each cited the same two causes: Medicaid funding pressure and clinical vacancy.
OB. General surgery. Behavioral health. Chemotherapy. These are the service lines disappearing first — low reimbursement, high staffing cost, hard to recruit. When the budget compresses and the position stays open, the unit goes under review. When it goes under review long enough, it closes.
A closed service line isn't a temporary status. Restoring it requires filling clinical positions, rebuilding ratios, and passing reaccreditation. The community feels it immediately. The recovery takes months.
We covered which units are most exposed, why the timeline to reopen one bed is longer than most leaders assume, and what has to happen before the next trigger.
Read it here →

Every week a production role sits open, you're paying for it, either in lost output or overtime at 1.5x the base rate.
Multiply that across five open roles. Then add a 20-30% agency markup when internal capacity runs out. The cost of waiting compounds fast.

The organizations that absorb seasonal surges without a spike in labor costs have one thing in common: they built their recruiting pipeline before the volume arrived.
Every week, a production role sits open, you're paying for it, either in lost output or overtime at 1.5x the base rate.
The math is in our latest blog post. Worth a read before Q3. https://hubs.ly/Q04d2vvg0