Nurse salaries are a vanishingly small portion of health care costs. They're largely a function of the difficulty in finding qualified nurses. It's unlikely that will change anytime soon.
> If you are earning next to nothing and are doing 200 widgets per minute a 10 fold salary increase wouldn't change the cost of the product per customer. If there also is a large profit margin the desire to keep wages down is more of a fetish than the sensible choice it is at the other end of the spectrum.
It depends on what portion of the cost of production is materials vs capital costs vs labor. You're presuming that labor is a small portion of the cost of production, which is probably true if you're selling them for $10. If it's an extremely low cost item, like plastic washers, labor can still be a significant part of the production costs. It also depends on whether you carry that down the supply chain, since part of your material cost is someone else's labor costs.
> Nursing care services are the most intensely used hospital services by acute hospital inpatients yet are poorly economically measured
This doesn't strike me as utterly insane. Most treatment prices should include the cost to have a nurse deliver it. The tiers of rooms should roughly approximate the amount of nursing care required outside of treatments. It's not perfect, but it might be better on the net than having nurses spend more time on the patient chart to add billing items.
I.e. it might be overall better to not have a specific line item for "rolled patient over to prevent sores" that the nurse has to enter in, and then billing has to argue with insurance about whether a roll was needed or not. It might be cheaper for everyone to figure out the average cost of providing nursing per tier, add a profit margin, and charge everyone that.
I'm not saying it is better, but it seems at least plausible.
Paying a nurse $125k instead of $80k is not going to appreciably increase the cost of healthcare for any individual patient when the radiologist makes $500k, the surgeon makes $750k, the charge nurse makes $200k, and you get billed $35 for a Tylenol.
Raise wages, you'll get more nurses.
Same with any other product or service.
Nursing is not different and is not resistant to the laws of supply and demand.
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 don´t know much about nursing specifically but it is actually interesting to account for how many customers served per employee and how many there are at the bottom of the organization. If you are earning next to nothing and are doing 200 widgets per minute a 10 fold salary increase wouldn't change the cost of the product per customer. If there also is a large profit margin the desire to keep wages down is more of a fetish than the sensible choice it is at the other end of the spectrum.
Depending on the type of job you also get a different "product" depending on how much you pay and you might not be able to measure it. Employees cut corners in the least visible way and do not brag about extra effort if they are paid well enough.
This[0] was a fun read.
>Nursing care services are the most intensely used hospital services by acute hospital inpatients yet are poorly economically measured
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>Nurses are an anomaly in the current inpatient billing system. Rather than bill for the actual services provided to the patient or the amount of time spent providing nursing care, the cost of nursing is embedded into the line item for room and board, which is the same fixed cost for every patient receiving the same level of care within a particular institution. In other words, all patients cared for on a given unit are billed the same room and board charge regardless of the actual amount of nursing care the patient utilized during that hospitalization.
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