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.
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.