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Comment by monero-xmr | Hacker News Reader

Not if you have licensing and immigration rules that make it impossible for new people to enter the field in response to a demand surge

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So what your saying is that instead of paying more we should import cheap labor at the expense of anyone who might be a nurse locally? Therefore depressing all wages across the board?..

Parent didn't say anything about cheap labor? What if there are just too few nurses locally?

I think the idea is that if you pay more, people will switch careers and become nurses. This isn't a great argument when it takes years to make a nurse, but you could at least get some people out of retirement or to afford childcare and come back to work.

That is not how I read it. I understood if you only have X people licensed as nurses you cannot hire X+Y people to be nurses where Y is greater than zero, even if you increase wages for all nurses.

You seem to think there's a solution that doesn't get implemented at someone's expense.

You may import cheap labor at the expense of local nurses. Or you may import expensive labor at the expense of the foreign patients and local taxpayers. Or you may do nothing at the expense of local patients.

The harsh reality is that there's not enough people being allowed to fill the jobs, and you can't create them without changing something - your policies or your standards.

Don't forget that every healthcare practitioner the West imports - I'm sorry "encourages to immigrate" - they remove a healthcare practitioner from a country that educated them, trained them, invested in their residence/practicum/rotations, and almost certainly needs them more than the West.

After all, why grow your own capacity to train and retain health care practitioners, when you can just take the non-Western world's instead?

> every healthcare practitioner

Just say every productive young person. West has decided to not have babies of its own and instead just import them from poorer parts of the world. As an immigrant myself, I'd say it is a good deal for the West and those immigrants, but will need homogeneous cultures to be open to cultural changes.

This also includes people that went through schools in Finland and would be paid the same money as a native.

There just a massive issue with our immigration service running out of capacity to handle applications in a timely manner and some stupid laws that need changing/updates.

Basically applications for a work permit can take somewhere between 3 to 9 months currently. A lot of people can't live that long in the country without a job so they will just go to some other EU/EEA country. Norway is a very popular option for example and will give you a yes or no decision in a week or two instead of half a year.

Would you rather have enough health care capacity, or be called a racist by the corporate media?

Tough choice if you're an oligarch.

If, as you say, this is a demand surge, classical economics would suggest that the price of the demanded good/service should go up.

The article, however, is very clear that this is a supply issue, and not a "demand surge."

In either case, it seems that equilibrium would set wages higher.

Why would you assume a free market system in healthcare?

Is that a free market system? It seems to me the parent is talking about the concept of price equilibrium, nothing else.

Price equilibrium is a foundational free market concept. It technically can't exist in a non-free market.

Why are you assuming that the labor market = the healthcare market?

I completely agree that "healthcare" is not a very free market. But we are not talking about buying medicine or medical procedures, are we?

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