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Comment by trinovantes | Hacker News Reader

You can start by paying doctors/nurses a better wage for the shit they have to put up with for the last 2 years

Our Ontario government capped nurse pay to 1% per year which is effectively a 8% paycut/year given the current inflation

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Unfortunately that's in line with the Bank of Canada's recommendation:

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"Mr. Macklem: [... T]he high inflation that we have today is not normal. It's not here to stay. We are resolute in our commitment to bring inflation down. We are taking action and we will continue to take action to bring inflation back down. So as a business, don't plan on the current rate of inflation staying. Don't build that into longer term contracts. Don't build that into wage contracts. It is going to take some time, but you can be confident that inflation will come down.

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- Tiff Macklem, Governor and CEO of the Bank of Canada in a webinar hosted by the Canadian Federation of Independent Business. Transcript here: https://20336445.fs1.hubspotusercontent-na1.net/hubfs/203364...

The reason he speaks to that is that he's worried about inflation increase due to a wage-price spiral. Depressing wages is a way to prevent that. And I'll mention now; I have no idea how true this is.

As a start, that means that your costs have substantially increased to provide the same amount of healthcare as before. That makes the funding problem bigger. I'm not sure how it is in Canada, but the NHS in the UK employs about 1.4 million people - and a lot of the problems with it are actually problems with our social care system being broken and leaving it nowhere to discharge patients to, which accounts for another 1.6 million workers. The UK's population is about 70 million people in total, a reasonable proportion of which are either too young or retired. This is only going to get more daunting as the population ages here and in other western countries, and as new treatments are developed and healthcare expectations increase.

On top of that, the real economy's capacity to supply workers with stuff to buy with their income is in deep trouble worldwide right now and everyone is feeling it. That means real wage drops across the board and real damage to the ability to actually fund something like this.

> As a start, that means that your costs have substantially increased to provide the same amount of healthcare as before.

Yes, that's how inflation works. Not a new problem, and GDP generally grows accordingly as well.

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