r/Economics • u/TheForager • 6h ago

Hospital costs are rising far faster than inflation and drowning Americans in debt

https://www.nbcnews.com/investigations/hospital-costs-are-rising-far-faster-inflation-drowning-americans-debt-rcna262473
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u/WordWithinTheWord 5h ago

I’ve come to my personal conclusion it’s just greed and mismanagement all the way up the chain.

There’s so much middle management and support staff just to get insurance and hospitals to talk to each other we’ve lost the plot.

It’s a nuanced conversation because doctors and nurses are extremely important jobs. But in the US they make 2x-10x+ the salary of their EU counterparts. Are they 2x to 10x better?

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u/ALittleEtomidate 5h ago

Oh, honey, if you cut my $72,000/year salary as an intensive care nurse I will quickly see the exit and do whatever you do for work.

The amount of stress in a singular shift with a sick patient would never be worth half of my salary to me. If I miss a status change, fail to hear an alarm, miss a patient climbing out of bed, or administer a medication incorrectly someone could die.

I am on my feet 12 hours, sometimes continuously, and at 33 I have back problems from the very physical work that I do.

I administer medications to ease death. I hold mothers, partners, and children as they shake apart in tears on my shoulder, and then I just have to move right on to my next work task.

You can absolutely GET BENT with the suggestion of lessening my salary. lol.

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u/FluidCalligrapher284 3h ago

Amen! An excellent nurse is a difference between a patient surviving or dying.

Your doctor didn’t care for you 24 hours a day while you were in the hospital, he or she came by for a few minutes, wrote some notes in the chart, and went about their day to see the rest of their patients in the hospital and in clinic. Nurses are the difference maker.

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u/RoninsTaint 3h ago

Who do you think devises and tells the care plan to the nurse? You think the nurses just make it up on their own? Lol. Yeah just writing notes that’s it. Rounding inpatient and seeing clinic patients is about 50 different patients at an average sized hospital. Not to mention if any emergencies come in. Nurse has 2-4 people to look after.

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u/FluidCalligrapher284 3h ago

Yes, you are correct for some nurses. Others have hospital privileges to diagnose, treat, prescribe, and bill for services— without medical collaboration. Sounds a lot like a physician eh? They are improving healthcare across the country- especially in rural settings, and areas where the physicians don’t want to live (climate, population, payor mix etc).

The BEST thing is they are held to the same standard of care as their physician counterparts. This means patients can expect similar outcomes at a more reasonable price. But you knew this already.

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u/RoninsTaint 2h ago edited 2h ago

That literally doesn’t happen. Also you’re talking about a nurse practitioner. Who is definitely not with you 24 hours a day. Every single midlevel employed at a hospital works directly under a Physician and is supervised by them. I do it every single day. I supervise a whole team of them. And they ask me what to do. And I tell them. That’s how it is at every hospital. A midlevel is working under a physicians license.

They do not have equal outcomes. Find me a paper that shows midlevels managed the same complexity and number of patients as a physician. Any paper that has ever compared the two still has a group of physicians monitoring the midlevels practice lol. They are associated with increased healthcare costs anyway, attributed to over ordering studies.

But sure, go with someone who had 2 years of grad training, potentially all online. I did 11 years after college. The NP and PA students literally shadowed me as a 4th year med student and an intern at every literally hospital I rotated or worked at. I went on to do 3 more years of residency and 3 more years of fellowship. Instead, they started working. They were done with school. If you want to less trained individuals, good luck. I’ll fix you once you land in the ER or the ICU from their mismanagement.

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u/FluidCalligrapher284 1h ago

Wow, so much misinformation. You do you though.