Which proves the article right: the guy labored hard to move the proceeds of his partners work into a forest of trusts that only he knows and that only benefits him personally, by statute. He can't be substituted anymore!
It is becoming clearer by the day that the job market is not an efficient market at all. Why keep pretending ?
Furthermore, if you think about how insurance risk pooling works, it's quite easy to see how an insurance-backed, profit-motivated healthcare system may not be the best vehicle to address a systemic health problem afflicting the entire population. You may recall AIG as a rough analogue for this situation. Or even entities insuring against natural disasters in California. The government has to step in to prevent failure.
And then we have the most obvious counterargument to your flawed thesis: why would labor compensation go up during a recession with high unemployment and considerable attendant macroeconomic instability? Those factors have contributed to dramatically increased substitutability and thus quite naturally suppress wage growth.
Yes, that is higher than I would have expected, but I do think it's unfairly low because personally I wouldn't do a nurses job for three times that, plus you need a degree to be an RN.
You're asking the wrong person for their opinion though - my job has very little stress and I earn more that that. I do have to endure quite a few minor annoyances however, but nothing like I imagine a nurse does.
For the record, I think a lot of jobs are artificially underpaid.
The best trick corporations ever did was to promote the illusion of such a thing as unskilled labor.
Yes, average cost of living in California is about the highest in the US, although there is large variation within different parts of the state. A comparison point might be that the average teacher in California is paid about $82,000/year: https://blogs.edweek.org/teachers/teaching_now/2019/04/which.... My impression from the overall range of numbers for the different states is that nurses are paid a considerably above average salary for a a difficult job.
> You're asking the wrong person for their opinion
Outside opinions are good --- I don't think there is a clear answer here. As an American, I was somewhat surprised by how high the nurse salaries are compared to other essential professions like teaching. I also agree that they seem very low compared to many tech professions. The question then is whether one should view the tech professions as overpaid or the nurses/teachers as underpaid. The easy answer is that under capitalism, paying for a more expensive programmer can help you make even more money; while paying more for a nurse or teacher doesn't necessarily improve your profit.
It claims that in 2019 the average salaries for RN's in the US varied from just under $60K/year in South Dakota and Mississippi to over $100K/year in Hawaii and California.
EMTs average $11/hr. Paramedics $17/hr. Paramedics, in particular, who are trained to autonomously administer near 60 drugs, to intubate people, in some cases start central lines (which even most nurses cannot do).