Are these really the people that should be required to work so much? Isn’t their job about handling life and death daily? Wouldn’t we want exactly these people to come fully rested to work every single day and be fully staffed?
I don’t know if there are jobs with similar stakes that are so carelessly staffed and disgustingly paid.
I think basically everyone, if you ask them directly, would agree with you. The issue is cost disease. In order to continue attracting workers to the medical profession, institutions must raise wages. Raised wages means more cost for the institution. But no medical institution gets a blank check to run its operations. So institutions are constantly looking for ways to save money, which often means hiring fewer people and making their existing workers work longer hours.
Medical institutions make billions, the CEO rates are insane. They don’t have to be
According to some random googling I did, the largest health care provider in the USA is HCA Healthcare. In 2025, their CEO made $26,456,606. Meanwhile, they had 316,000 employees in 2024. If the CEO were fired, that would mean each employee could be paid an extra $866 per year. The company’s total salaries and benefits came to $32.2 billion in 2024, averaging $107,333 per employee. Firing the CEO could result in hiring an additional 260 full time employees, increasing the number of employees in the company by 0.08%.
So based on this napkin math, you can be opposed to CEO pay on an ideological basis - but not on the basis that it would have a non-negligible impact on this specific issue.
That is far, far, far greater than the average of their CNAs, nurses, custodial staff, basically the bulk of their workforce is either at or near minimum, or making around half that if they’re the higher paid chunk of the vast majority of the workforce. I’m willing to bet the top 10% makes close to 90% of the wages
I mean, it also seemed high to me. My guess is
Of course, if you have some proof that 90% of those wages are going to 10% of earners in the company, I’m all ears. But I kind of doubt it.
It’s not so much the CEO’s direct pay. It’s what they are paid to do. CEOs generally get paid to maximise shareholder dividends and stock value, which leads to them doing anything they can to minimise the staff’s wages, and minimising the staff in general, to keep down costs, especially in something where inputs and outputs are not strictly correlated, like medicine, where you can’t hire 10% more nurses and expect to get 10% more patients paying bills. The CEO’s work probably hurts everyone involved except for the shareholders, but it increases profit margin so they do it.
This is a fair enough critique of the US system.
But to the topic of “why are medical staff overworked?” we see this in countries other than the US as well. Typically because even if institutions arent trying to maximize shareholder value, they are still having to make due with limited funds allocated to them by the government in the face of rising (or potentially rising) healthcare worker wages.
The rising wages of NHS healthcare workers are only a problem if the taxes are not being levied to cover it from the profits the care enables. Without medical care, companies would have more lost productivity, which is the non-moral/economic motivation for an NHS. If the extra productivity were reclaimed in the form of corporate taxes, there would be no budgeting shortfall.
Sure, but there are a few problems here.
First is that the total cost of a health intervention is not fixed, and there is always a give and take between providers, who want to provide better care/make more money, and whoever is paying, who wants good care without overpaying. Writing a bureaucracy a blank check is never going to happen.
So you would need to quantify how much reclaimed productivity you are gaining, which seems like a rather fraught endeavor.
And most medical care provided to people in developed nations is care provided to the elderly, who are not in the work force. So your productivity reclaimation tax would still have a shortfall, which you would need to make up somehow. And voters tend to not like higher taxes, so governments tend to not want to raise them, even for reasonable things like adequate funding of medical care for seniors.
Hospitals shouldn’t be “making money” directly. They are there to heal people. A healed worker is an indirect gain to the economy. Good care and good prevention mean a stronger, fitter, and more productive society.
I bet that the better the care a hospital provides, the less recurring patients it will have and the quicker it will be able to release patients.
I mean, I didn’t say anything about making money. Public institutions will face the same pressures in the face of rising wages outside the healthcare sector. Hospitals are filled with old people, who are sometimes racist assholes, who need their bedpans cleaned. And whoever needs to do that cleaning needs to get paid a competitive wage. And so if a public institution isn’t allocated additional funds to compensate for increased wages (and bureaucracies and legislatures hate increasing funds) they will need to find a way to save money.
Also, a very large portion of people in hospitals will never work again, as they are the elderly. Of course, we should care for these people - but just saying that if you try to take an economic prodictivity tack with your argument, you will run into this problem