High Pay for Covid-19 Nurses Leads to Shortages at Some Hospitals - WSJ
Nursing pay may never be this good again, she said, and persistent understaffing means that working conditions for staff nurses aren’t likely to improve.
This is not just about the ongoing pandemic. This is a problem that has been endemic for so long in the US healthcare system that it has become the status quo. Hospitals are run for profit, maximizing their profits by running on the bare minimum staff and paying them as little as the market will bear. But you can bet your life that when the executives who make those staffing and pay decisions fall sick, THEY do not have to queue for hours waiting to be assessed in the emergency room.
Hospitals have reported chronic nurse shortages for several years. The National Institutes of Health estimates that there was a shortage of about one million nurses in the U.S. in 2020.
Many of the for-profit hospital systems, flush with cash, can afford to pay the huge crisis bonuses we are now seeing. Smaller not-for-profit hospitals can't. This is not sustainable. The pigeons are coming home to roost, as the saying goes. Over a period of decades we have cut our healthcare services system to the bone, and now we NEED them, and — SHOCK! HORROR! Eighteen months into this pandemic WE'RE STILL NOT READY.
This is a gigantic clusterfuck. And you just KNOW that the costs of all these bonuses are going to be used after the pandemic is finally over as a justification for why they need to cut staffing and/or pay. Again.
