Are these really the people that should be required to work so much? Isn’t their job about handling life and death daily? Wouldn’t we want exactly these people to come fully rested to work every single day and be fully staffed?
I don’t know if there are jobs with similar stakes that are so carelessly staffed and disgustingly paid.
I think basically everyone, if you ask them directly, would agree with you. The issue is cost disease. In order to continue attracting workers to the medical profession, institutions must raise wages. Raised wages means more cost for the institution. But no medical institution gets a blank check to run its operations. So institutions are constantly looking for ways to save money, which often means hiring fewer people and making their existing workers work longer hours.
Medical institutions make billions, the CEO rates are insane. They don’t have to be
According to some random googling I did, the largest health care provider in the USA is HCA Healthcare. In 2025, their CEO made $26,456,606. Meanwhile, they had 316,000 employees in 2024. If the CEO were fired, that would mean each employee could be paid an extra $866 per year. The company’s total salaries and benefits came to $32.2 billion in 2024, averaging $107,333 per employee. Firing the CEO could result in hiring an additional 260 full time employees, increasing the number of employees in the company by 0.08%.
So based on this napkin math, you can be opposed to CEO pay on an ideological basis - but not on the basis that it would have a non-negligible impact on this specific issue.
That is far, far, far greater than the average of their CNAs, nurses, custodial staff, basically the bulk of their workforce is either at or near minimum, or making around half that if they’re the higher paid chunk of the vast majority of the workforce. I’m willing to bet the top 10% makes close to 90% of the wages
I mean, it also seemed high to me. My guess is
Of course, if you have some proof that 90% of those wages are going to 10% of earners in the company, I’m all ears. But I kind of doubt it.
It’s not so much the CEO’s direct pay. It’s what they are paid to do. CEOs generally get paid to maximise shareholder dividends and stock value, which leads to them doing anything they can to minimise the staff’s wages, and minimising the staff in general, to keep down costs, especially in something where inputs and outputs are not strictly correlated, like medicine, where you can’t hire 10% more nurses and expect to get 10% more patients paying bills. The CEO’s work probably hurts everyone involved except for the shareholders, but it increases profit margin so they do it.
This is a fair enough critique of the US system.
But to the topic of “why are medical staff overworked?” we see this in countries other than the US as well. Typically because even if institutions arent trying to maximize shareholder value, they are still having to make due with limited funds allocated to them by the government in the face of rising (or potentially rising) healthcare worker wages.