Are these really the people that should be required to work so much? Isn’t their job about handling life and death daily? Wouldn’t we want exactly these people to come fully rested to work every single day and be fully staffed?
I don’t know if there are jobs with similar stakes that are so carelessly staffed and disgustingly paid.
This is a fair enough critique of the US system.
But to the topic of “why are medical staff overworked?” we see this in countries other than the US as well. Typically because even if institutions arent trying to maximize shareholder value, they are still having to make due with limited funds allocated to them by the government in the face of rising (or potentially rising) healthcare worker wages.
The rising wages of NHS healthcare workers are only a problem if the taxes are not being levied to cover it from the profits the care enables. Without medical care, companies would have more lost productivity, which is the non-moral/economic motivation for an NHS. If the extra productivity were reclaimed in the form of corporate taxes, there would be no budgeting shortfall.
Sure, but there are a few problems here.
First is that the total cost of a health intervention is not fixed, and there is always a give and take between providers, who want to provide better care/make more money, and whoever is paying, who wants good care without overpaying. Writing a bureaucracy a blank check is never going to happen.
So you would need to quantify how much reclaimed productivity you are gaining, which seems like a rather fraught endeavor.
And most medical care provided to people in developed nations is care provided to the elderly, who are not in the work force. So your productivity reclaimation tax would still have a shortfall, which you would need to make up somehow. And voters tend to not like higher taxes, so governments tend to not want to raise them, even for reasonable things like adequate funding of medical care for seniors.
And yet people have calculated it in the past and do so regularly. It’s their job. We aren’t qualified or trained to do it but they are, so they do.
This is where the moral arguments come in and society either taxes corporations more than the productivity gain because people are more important than company profits, or denies service to the elderly because company profits are more important than people. It would be a twisted ideological view that the tax has to be precisely equal to the value given to the companies, regardless of outcome.