It does if you're willing to be a travel nurse and work on covid floors. I've been hearing $6000/week numbers being thrown around (and some nurses are picking up two contracts at a time!). It's insanely shitty work right now (surrounded by people dying left and right and understaffed on top of that, but the pay is good...).
Have to incorporate a premium for the travel nurse job being not in your home office, income being more volatile than a salaried job, and travel nurses are independent contractors so they have to pay for housing/health insurance/taxes.
The $6k per week easily comes down to $3k per week or less of comparable W-2 income, which you can come close to or surpass doing virtual scrum meetings with none of the income volatility of nursing nor the messiness or risk of being infected or attacked. And not seeing your family/friends after work.
The travel job typically has housing built in too and often per diems. So probably closer to 4-5k equivalent! But quality of life isn't great to your point. Software is the objectively better job there unless you're really passionate about nursing!
Probably because procedure volume was down, so they canned people who they could. And then got caught off guard when demand increased again suddenly. Same thing happens over and over in manufacturing.
It's inherent when quarterly numbers trump long term stability. If managers are only incentivized to meet short term numbers, they make decisions that are detrimental to the future to meet present-day goals. Our financial markets reward this (though there's a question about why they do this that's open in my mind, as most of the money in the market is invested long-term!), so it trickles down into managerial metrics.
There's a huge bottleneck in training and education of the licensed professionals involved in nursing.
To have a 'truly free market', there wouldn't be government licensing (a similar role would likely be carried out by third party certification).
I don't think that eliminating licensing would improve anything, but the regulation of nurse training absolutely needs to be included in the discussion of the problem.
> if there's a truly free market solution to this issue with hospital staffing.
You are seeing it happen. People do not accept current labor prices for healthcare work, politicians come under political fire for not providing sufficient level of healthcare, politicians increase funding to healthcare to increase pay, possibly requiring increasing taxes if they cannot figure out how to punt them to future generations.
Or insufficient number of voters want to direct more resources to healthcare to those that cannot afford it out of their own pocket, and they get less or lower quality healthcare. Maybe society decides it is not worth the cost of supporting people past 90, or even 80.
There's plenty of people willing to work at the offered salaries, there is a structural problem in the licensing process preventing them from doing so.
A case can be made for doctors who have limited residency spots effectively capping new yearly supply, but what possible argument could there be for nurses other than nurse pay is not high enough to attract more people to nursing?
People changing bedpans get paid $10 to $15 per hour in many states, who wants to do that unless they have zero other options?
How do you know the people not accepted would have made desirable nurses? Surely one would want some minimum standard for the people poking you with needles and administering your healthcare/medicines.
> The trainers that are training are not well compensated.
I don't know it, but I sort of take it as a given that the marginal rejectees are going to be roughly as capable as the marginal acceptees. It's not really an aggressive assumption.
And it isn't just an insufficient pay scenario. Hospitals just pass on the high cost of nursing to patients instead of subsidizing training programs. Patients don't see the supply as part of the cost problem and don't demand that more money be devoted to education.
Yes, the feedback mechanisms get
quite complicated because 80%+ of people cannot not afford the level of healthcare that they receive.
But the root of the problem remains the disparity in people’s expectations of the services they will receive with the amount those service providers are getting paid.
Health care is so regulated that the word free market doesn't make any sense.
A truely free market solution would be to train people specially to deal with COVID-19 cases and build a specialized hospital to deal with that. It would also bring the cost down.
Any kind of efficient resource allocation relies on accurate predictions. No matter what system you use, free market or otherwise, if reality is constantly defying prediction, or changes too quickly, allocation won't be great.
When push comes to shove, 99.x% of healthcare professionals get it. So we're taking a rounding error in staffing. The problem is how many nurses just got up and quit in the past couple years
A lot of these nurses will not go back, pay raise or not. Sister gets inundated with offers 2x to sometimes 3x her current pay, but she'd rather avoid the stress. Many of her former coworkers have also moved on.
How about 4x, 5x, or 6x pay? I would throw my own hat in the ring for $800k/year.
The job is not hard in the sense that only a few people in the world possess the capacity to do it.
Society needs to decide what it values more - quality bedside care in hospitals to people that cannot afford to pay out of pocket, or paying people a lot to sling spreadsheets to each other from the comfort of their home.
Why would it not? Staffing for healthcare workers had been barebones for a long time before Covid.
Obviously, the acute situation of today, I would not count. But when managing a society, and you pay rock bottom prices and lower quality of life for a couple decades to limit supply of healthcare workers so that you are running on razor thin margins, then the future where lack of healthcare workers in cases of emergency are inevitable.
Because you are allowed to do the work if you are licensed. The cost of a nurse is conditioned on the licensed supply, not the willingness of Joe Programmer to do it for $800,000.
At the moment, if you chose to go into nursing, the choice wouldn't matter, because the licensing pipeline is full!
I agree with you that in the current situation of 1 to 2 years, my choice does not matter.
> The cost of a nurse is conditioned on the licensed supply, not the willingness of Joe Programmer to do it for $800,000.
The supply of a nurse is conditioned on cash flow prospects. If nursing paid more and had a history of having decent pay to lifestyle ratio, then there would have been more supply of nurses.
That was my underlying point. All of these problems are a problem of society’s willingness to spend x resources on y cause, and it should get very interesting as the population pyramid gets much older than ever before in the world’s history.
For example, I am not enthused at directing a lot of society’s resources at sustaining 80+ year olds while our kids are not well taken care. But that is a different topic.
The only reason this disease was such a big issue was because hospitals were constantly operating on slim margins in the first place with ICUs regularly filling up in winter. How about some breathing room for all involved?
The sad thing is, this kind of money oriented, employee exploiting attitude is just as prevalent among academic and non-profit hospitals as the for profit ones.
Mandated vaccines in healthcare settings aren’t a new demand though. It’s more like a certificate that takes an hour is added to the list of 8 other certificates you need to maintain.
This is a clear example of regulation making cars more complex! In the 70s, there were no crumple zones, airbags, backup cameras, traction control, lighting intensity requirements, or a whole host of other things that are mandated today. Those things do cost money.
That said, this is also a clear shift in consumer demand too - a 1970s $3500 car is going to be a sedan, small, and pretty featureless. Compare that to a $20k Corolla today - which is the same proportion of median income that the $3500 car was in the 70s. It's larger, more reliable, safer, and has a whole bunch more features.
Which is effectively a battery! Hydrogen production is energy intensive, but if you produce it with excess energy capacity and then use it when it's needed, it's a decent energy storage method. Though mobile applications (air travel, trains, etc) are more likely to dominate in the shorter terms as it's lighter than batteries in high power applications
I've never been called off for the threat of severe non-winter weather anywhere. And the risk of being in a house hit by this tornado was probably higher than in the warehouse.
The lack of tornado shelter is the problem here - or more likely, they probably had one but weren't instructed to use it...
Their pay is pretty good in comparison to many others: "Under the rejected agreement, veteran workers, who Kellogg has said make about $35 an hour on average, would have received a 3 percent wage increase in the first year and cost-of-living adjustments in subsequent years. Newer hires make almost $22 per hour, according to the company."
