I am well aware. But perhaps there just aren’t enough total humans who have the proper training and certification to provide enough coverage. Even if you made them all work as many hours as humanly possible, there just aren’t enough. Even if you start training more, it takes too long and they are needed immediately. Even if you could train people quickly, and were willing to pay for it, not enough people want to go into that field of work because it sucks.
What do you do then? Just triage and only handle the most serious cases and that’s that? Some people just go without? If there is someone available who is capable of providing some amount of proper care to any of the waiting patients, is that not better than absolutely nothing, laws and certifications be damned?
I think one part of the solution is to implement other policies in our society to reduce emergencies. Look at the people who are coming into the ER, and why. Whatever caused those emergencies, make those parts of our society safer if possible. Then less people will come, and demand for medical service will go down. Looking at you traffic safety!
Hospital lobbyists are the reason we don’t have many of the protections you are mentioning. As a union member, specifically of a very politically active union, and a healthcare workers, I will say this is largely this way on purpose as it’s the most profitable way to operate. Hell, here in Oregon the governor’s race was only close because is how much they wanted to stop the Democratic candidate from winning as she’s a strong proponent of these protections. Every time we’ve had a bill in legislature to address this, they’ve influenced it. Chalk another one up to “fuck capitalism”.
Insurance is definitely a part of it but on this front it’s mostly the hospitals and health organizations. Unfortunately, the pandemic has drastically accelerated US healthcare’s race to the bottom with how much bullshit they were allowed to pull during the state of emergency we were under for a large portion of the time, even disregarding certain portions of union contracts, and now with what will likely be a staffing shortage for the indefinite future.
That’s not to say regulations would be meaningless though. Minimum patient to staff ratios are necessary and many more steps will help ensure better patient outcomes but the reality is the current healthcare system, combined with the education system, cannot continue functioning long-term without dramatic changes.
The strike worked and the nurses are going back in. They won the main thing they were looking for. Immediate guaranteed enforceable safe staffing ratios.
The thing I’m very curious about is how these ratios will be implemented. Ideally they would hire many many more nurses so that each individual nurse has an appropriate number of patients to care for. But how could they possibly do that so immediately?
I keep reading all this other news about labor shortages and boomers retiring. It’s hard for me not to think that we have a situation where the demand for goods and services is exceeding the amount that can be provided by all the people who are willing and able to work. If that’s true, I don’t see any future where there isn’t any consequence other than more inflation and reduced quality of life for just about everyone.
The supply of labor for almost all jobs will rise dramatically with increased pay.
The “value” is the problem of capitalism. Many things people want have no real value. E.g., you can’t make large videogames or movies without huge numbers of expensive people and sell them at a price that most people are willing to pay and still make a profit.
Subsidies, non-profit-incentive capital structures (e.g., co-ops, state-funded companies, and volunteerism enabled by some form of Universal Basic Income or other state-sponsored incentive system are necessary to both make things and not exploit the people making them.
If hospitals were funded, with budgets, through government spending, it is no longer a question of “how do we pay all these people enough to get them to work while still making a profit providing health care?” It becomes “how much health care can we provide with this budget?”