I’m the nurse who called 911 for help with staffing

We can see the detritus of those days in the names of Baylor, Baptist, Presbyterian, St Michael's etc.

Like the UK and Europe pay absolute peanuts in comparison, just like in Tech, Law, etc. too.

Regardless of whether you think the nurses deserve the pay raise, I have a hard time understanding why you’d think that squeezing suppliers isn’t part of capitalism. For instance, I doubt people would call Apple anti capitalist for refusing to accept TSMC’s price hikes.

Same with bailouts.

"Oh, you don't have enough money to survive 6 to 12 months without income / did something dumb... wow, that really sucks. Well... bye."

You see a midwife to give birth, not a nurse. I believe they’re also striking, but they’re not nurses and it’s an entirely different strike.

Every time I've seen medical strikes, workers organize emergency crews who stay behind to avoid exactly that. People choose medical professions to help others, and especially nurses typically do so despite the working conditions.

UK has public healthcare. The primary mechanism how public healthcare keeps costs low is to use its monopsonistic market power to keep prices (including wages) as low as possible.

The most expensive part would be getting equipment but I am sure you could bait away people with the promise of ethical & responsible healthcare while being paid a fair salary. Something between a local charity clinic and a highly trauma-rated hospital.

For instance, I use a local walk-in clinic like a primary care doctor but they occasionally tell you to go to the hospital. You can basically fit in between a walk-in clinic and a trauma rated hospital.

Hospitals are emphatically not a public good. From wikipedia

>In economics, a public good (also referred to as a social good or collective good)[1] is a good that is both non-excludable and non-rivalrous. For such goods, users cannot be barred from accessing or using them for failing to pay for them. Also, use by one person neither prevents access of other people nor does it reduce availability to others.[1] Therefore, the good can be used simultaneously by more than one person.[2]

Hospitals definitely turn away patients who can't pay (non-emergencies), and a patient occupying a hospital bed prevents others from using it.

I don't have an answer but in your case I'm not sure more government is the right thing to do.

The main source of our dysfunction is this "HMO" fallacy that a 10kft-view insurance company can somehow create the intelligence to administer effective care. Rather, what we've gotten is more opaqueness, more market inefficiency, onerous and arbitrary approval/denials for arbitrary procedures, and every incentive for doctors to kick the can down the road as each visit is a billable event.

To me, the obvious market based solution is based around making medical providers provide straightforward prices or rate schedules, like every other industry, as a requirement of forming a binding contract to bill against. Regulate that prices are all the same no matter who is paying, and regulate that every medical insurance plan must pay any provider. The sheer majority of care happens very slowly - not the emergency "car crash" example some healthy person with little experience with the medical system will inevitably throw out as an argument.

Regulate the insurance industry such that coverage must be purely in financial terms. If an insurance company wants to set some cutoff on what they think a given serrvice should cost, they can do so in a transparent manner that can be easily checked against all provider quotes. Otherwise the default dynamic is to reimburse some percentage of all expenses.

Emergency service costs get limited statutorily, similar to how the state regulates towing rates (when the police call to get a car towed, etc). Due to lobbying, these costs generally end up higher the open market, so there is no problem with constraining the market.

Public health insurance plans continue to exist in the new framework, for those of limited means and those without access to insurance. Ideally we work towards unbundling insurance from employment over time, but that's not a necessary component.

Of course I realize this is all a pipe dream given the aforementioned lobbies, despite the little bit of recent noise towards price "transparency". I'm not opposed to single payer (basically using two of the lobbies to kill the third), but the rot in our system goes far beyond the mere billing nonsense that makes much of the news and I don't think single payer would be enough to reform the deeper problem of providing effective care.

Remember y'all, every single nurse must be a superhuman who can deal with an infinite amount of stress of they're not a "real nurse". If only owners who didn't staff enough people in their medical facilities weren't "real owners" of said facilities, I think that would fix a lot of our issues.

This is absolutely not true. Study after study have proven that there is a limit to the number of hours someone is willing to work.

The real solution is to increase the NUMBER of nurses. This means removing the artificial barriers to entry.

Their issue is BURNOUT and this is caused by staffing shortages and partly this is caused by artificial barriers to entry.

Train more nurses, alleviate the shortages.

It's not clear to me from the story if the personnel sent over by the fire department were paramedics at all. The actions described would be well within the scope of a BLS first responder.

If I had to guess, the chief sent a BLS engine company, which would typically consist of 3-4 people, all trained to the EMT/FR level.

In my region EMS is separate but the firefighters still have plenty of first aid training and would be able to provide the response they did in this article.

Hospitals were understaffed prior to Covid (because managers were being cheap and refusing to have sufficient staff) and with many anti-vaxxers assaulting and threatening healthcare workers, many nurses quit the industry.

There aren't any other local hospitals. The nearest other hospitals are in Seattle. Her hospital is in Silverdale. Silverdale and Seattle are separated by Puget Sound, so even though they are only maybe 15 miles apart, you either have to drive the long way around Puget Sound or you have to take a ferry.

Without crossing Puget Sound the nearest other hospitals would be in Tacoma which is around a 40 mile drive away.