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.
Some got fired. Some quit and found different, better paying jobs. The reality is that being on staff, working at the bedside in a hospital is a hard job with mediocre pay. But hospitals will give docs huge bonuses and pay travel nurses 2-3x what they pay nurses already on payroll. My wife was an RN at a major pediatric hospital and took a job at a private practice. Much easier job, closer to home, better pay. The hospital called her a month after she left and offered a 5k rehire bonus. Thank you, but no.
I'm near Dayton, Ohio. We had lots of protesting back in August by self-proclaimed medical personnel who were unhappy with vaccine mandates. How many of these people were actually medical personnel, and how many actually quit due to their opposition to the mandate isn't clear, but the feeling I was left with was that a significant number of local medical personnel were unhappy with the mandate.
Mandates and threats are counter productive. Lotteries are associated with waste and make government seem desperate. If the government was really wanted to encourage vaccinations it would provide a fixed compensation.
> It has a more dangerous risk profile than the previously accepted vaccines
Is there compelling research that shows this is actually true? There is elevated risk of heart inflammation, but in my understanding that is not an unprecedented vaccine side effect. I haven’t seen an in depth comparison to established vaccines though
As for neurological side effects, I just read this a morning this large study from uk comparing risks between the conventional platform ChadOx, the BioNTech mRNA platform, and actual coronavirus infection. The two vaccine platforms seen at least on par with each other, and both favorable to infection
