When push comes to shove, 99.x% of healthcare professionals get it. So we're taking a rounding error in staffing. The problem is how many nurses just got up and quit in the past couple years
Hence the problem is lack of sufficient compensation for their quality of life at work.
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.
If not, your willingness to do the job doesn't matter, not at any price.
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.
At the moment, if you chose to go into nursing, the choice wouldn't matter, because the licensing pipeline is full!
> 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.
If costs to go to a hospital double overnight, we may end up with worse problems than a staff shortage.
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.
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.
In fact I have.