By Elizabeth Lopatto on March 22, 2012

 

After years of working with a neurosurgeon and a heart surgeon, nurse practitioner Kathy Kenny opened her own medical practice last year in Chandler, Ariz., where she provides some of the same screenings and treatments that doctors do. Kenny is among 148,000 nurse practitioners who will have to pick up the slack beginning in 2014, if the Supreme Court allows President Barack Obama’s health-care law to add at least 30 million people to U.S. hospital, clinic, and doctors’ practices already suffering a shortage of physicians.