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.

Are you a licensed or registered nurse?

If not, your willingness to do the job doesn't matter, not at any price.

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.

I think his point is that, for 800k a year, he'd be sufficiently incentivized to try and get licensed.

The question then becomes 'who can afford care?'

If costs to go to a hospital double overnight, we may end up with worse problems than a staff shortage.

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.

But if they pay more, they’ll need to keep paying more even after the crisis is past. Which is pretty much what hospitals are trying to avoid.

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?

Did you miss the bit about the money, though?

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.