alt Hacker NewsDoctors are only part of the problem. Nurses and all of the other skilled positions also all suck up huge amounts of money because there are shortages of all of them.
It was bad even before COVID, it’s even worse now. There are tons of regulations prohibiting the significant increase in creating new doctors and nurses (and air traffic controllers, but that’s a different but remarkably similar story).
Limits on new providers, and tons of corrupt regulation keeping people from opening new medical schools, clinics, and hospitals.
A ton of it is simple supply and demand - and the supply side is capped. Go to a place with a functioning competitive market and the prices (and wages) are a fraction of what they are in the US.
Again like doctors, nurse wages aren’t a major factor in the discrepancy between US healthcare costs and elsewhere. They are a factor, in a death by a thousand cuts situation.
In a source posted by another commenter, their wages are accountable for 5% of the difference.
I also don’t think it’s accurate to say regulations are what’s prohibiting an increase in nurses. They don’t have a government imposed mechanism like residency funding that creates a bottleneck like the one in medical training.
We have a nurse shortage because we have an aging population increasing demand, it’s a tough job, and people are leaving the profession.