Can you say irony? Or, nurses have no sense of humor

A brilliantly funny post on The Health Care Blog skewers the pending Nursing Relief Act, a peculiar GOP health-care reform idea that proposes — despite rising unemployment — to deal with the nursing shortage not by training more RNs or by increasing wages and benefits to make nursing a more sought-after profession, but by providing visas to hundreds of thousands of nurses from overseas:

"Incidentally, this is just the approach that was so successful in cutting the salaries earned by information technology workers about 10 years ago. Corporate profits were getting impacted by high IT costs, so our brilliant Congress increased the number of H1-B visas, and companies were able to hire cheap workers from India and other places. Thank you, Congress! Later, many of these foreign workers returned to their homelands and brought the work with them. Now, corporate America doesn't have to pay high salaries, and they don't even have to look at the foreigners anymore — they can just write a little check to India. Bravo! Fortunately, information technology salaries have never rebounded to the levels where they were.

"But I digress. Back to nursing. Let's face it, nursing is difficult, degrading work. Nurses sometimes have to wipe feces, for Christ's sake. We're Americans and we're better that that! We can certainly find some Indians, Filipinos, or Chinese to do that work, ridding self-respecting Americans of the need to perform that dirty job...."

Alas, the comments reveal the perils of sarcasm on da internets.