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.
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.