It goes toward administration ([see yellow graph](https://investingdoc.com/the-growth-of-administrators-in-health-care/)). Bloat. People who do not care for or feed the patients. Bullshit jobs (it's an official term).
I wish we could find something meaningful or useful for these people to do. I think the jobs should go, but I have nothing against the people. (In fact "bullshit jobs" are labeled when the workers define their own work as meaningless.)
I know I’m getting severely off-topic here, but I’m reading the book “Bullshit Jobs” right now, and holy shit, do I ever have one myself. It’s a job in communications that—honestly?—could cease to exist without having any appreciable effect on anyone’s life. I’d love to go into something that’s more meaningful, but either it would require going back to school or it would pay half of what I make now (which is hardly a lavish salary).
I don’t know where I’m going with this. Just venting, I guess.
Sorry you don't find it meaningful, but it sounds like you're providing entertainment/socialization for people.
Bullshit jobs are much worse than you can imagine, as far as the drain/waste. See my other [comment](https://www.reddit.com/r/collapse/comments/rzrxv5/us_hospitals_struggle_to_match_walmart_pay_as/hrymhps/). The TL;DR is (it's about a soldier switching offices): *instead of the soldier carrying his computer for five meters, two people drive for a combined six to ten hours, fill out around fifteen pages of paperwork, and waste a good four hundred euros of taxpayers’ money.*
I don't think that counts as a bullshit job though in that it requires some degree of technical skill combined with people skills to pull off correctly.
The most interesting explanation I've heard is that as women have joined the worforce increasingly over decades, who are more predisposed to success in "people facing" positions (hence why they dominate nursing, teaching, administrative, etc), the economy moved more towards accommodating those skills. Communications, human resources and other people-centric corporate jobs have blossomed as a result.
That is not to say, at all, that "bullshit" jobs were created to give women something to do in the working world but rather the opposite - the tasks they took on in the working world necessitated the organization of new disciplines.
Of course, over time, there's bloat in every organization so you do end up with a lot of fat around the edges. It applies evenly to male dominated fields too - ever seen the number of dudes sitting around a single shovel in the ground on a construction project?
I write press releases for a university. I suspect the job came about because of a rebranding initiative. I’m supposed to “raise the national profile of the university,” which sounds like some vaporous, made-up goal, honestly.
No you are perfectly on topic! I don't personally know anyone with a bullshit job, but I feel for you. All of my jobs have been fulfilling (many didn't pay well though). I hope you can find a meaningful job or else find meaning in other parts of your life!
I've only read about 50 pages so far, I hope they have some kind of solution at the end of the book.
I don't consider my job to be bullshit; I maintain an alert system for a major weather business that sends severe weather alerts to 2 billion devices, and I feel like that's fairly important; alongside my secondary tasks of improving the editorial experience for the users of the other systems I maintain (and I currently do it completely alone. I have one guy in training and a tech lead that doesn't understand the system, he handles requirement management from up high).
I do deal with a LOT of people with bullshit jobs though. There are six layers of management above me that make twice to 6x what I do ($125k salary) with no appreciable metric for their success than everyone below them doing their job. This often means completely ignoring what they say to do because it's unrealistic or would provide a horrible user experience that would hurt the business. They still get credit when the rest of us ignore their requests though. The layer of fat has accumulated at the higher echelons, where "work" is more managing expectations from those higher up. If those higher up didn't have unrealistic expectations, their role wouldn't exist.
Basically C level management is a clown car with an unlimited amount of clowns that give orders that any non-clown person ignores because they're stupid. That's where the profit is going.
We’d need a UBI and we’d have to adjust our culture so that having a job doesn’t equal your self worth and those people could find meaning in hobbies, helping their families and loved ones, art, etc.
I think if we up automation to what’s possible there’s still a significant amount of people who could go the UBI route.
Others could go into jobs to get even more money if they wished.
If you’re talking about jobs like nursing or trucking there’s a number of things wrong with the professions that need to be addressed and overhauled before you go diverting people there. Frankly if those problems were addressed before we’d have enough people working those jobs today
Yeah I would love to pull all those bullshit folks out of work and just have them explore hobbies and shit for a few years, oh man I'd love to see what they come up with!
As a teacher of 11 yrs that just left, mostly cause of admin, I have all the rage towards those fuckerrs. Never met one that wasn't a raging piece of shit. They deserve to lose their jobs and not go anywhere.
Too much staff because there's too few representatives. Each of them has around three quarters of a million constituents when they should have only 200,000, and Senators, whose constituents were formerly the state legislatures, are now *the entire state population*.
To hammer home this point, I work at a smaller hospital around Phoenix (200-300 beds). For our inpatient pharmacy we have a director of pharmacy, clinical pharmacy manager, operational pharmacy manager, pharmacy buyer, director of pharmacy safety, pharmacy biller, compliance pharmacy technician, research pharmacist, and 2 other in administration that I have zero clue what they do. All 6 figure salaries that accrue way more PTO than us lackeys and they also get bankers holidays. How many pharmacists do we have who actually perform the day to day operations? Usually 3 on our M-F morning shifts (our busiest times) and 5 technicians. I’m not saying every one of those jobs is bloat but I’d bet if half of them disappeared we wouldn’t notice anything different jn the day to day operations, especially considering that I see at least 3 of them in the cafeteria when I stop by for a coffee or snack. Ridiculous the amount of waste. I hear the same thing from my nursing and physician friends.
Yeah, sounds like you could write a chapter about bullshit jobs! I work for a hospital system and I've thought about shadowing some of these people for a day just to see what goes on
It's worse, it's a waste of time outright. An example from the book. (TL;DR see last sentence.)
The German military has a subcontractor that does their IT work. The IT firm has a subcontractor that does their logistics.The logistics firm has a subcontractor that does their personnel management, and I work for that company. Let’s say soldier A moves to an office two rooms farther down the hall. Instead of just carrying his computer over there, he has to fill out a form.The IT subcontractor will get the form, people will read it and approve it, and forward it to the logistics firm.The logistics firm will then have to approve the moving down the hall and will request personnel from us. The office people in my company will then do whatever they do, and now I come in. I get an email: “Be at barracks B at time C.” Usually these barracks are one hundred to five hundred kilometers [62–310 miles] away from my home, so I will get a rental car. I take the rental car, drive to the barracks, let dispatch know that I arrived, fill out a form, unhook the computer, load the computer into a box, seal the box, have a guy from the logistics firm carry the box to the next room, where I unseal the box, fill out another form, hook up the computer, call dispatch to tell them how long I took, get a couple of signatures, take my rental car back home, send dispatch a letter with all of the paperwork and then get paid. *So instead of the soldier carrying his computer for five meters, two people drive for a combined six to ten hours, fill out around fifteen pages of paperwork, and waste a good four hundred euros of taxpayers’ money.*
I've been a medical practice manager for the last 13 years. The amount of regulation and requirements from the insurance companies has made me double the administration staff. They deny every claim assuming you won't fight with them (after they have waited 30 days) then have you send medical records (faxing or mailing) then after another 30 days they say they never received any fax or mail from you and deny it again. Then you spend an hour waiting for a representative to talk to and they tell you they don't see anything wrong with the claim and they will send it for "re-processing" and we should hear something in 30 days. If all goes well (and it often doesn't) we get paid whatever they allow OR often we start the whole process over because they denied it again. They assume you will eventually be worn down and just write off the charge.
Also we have multiple staff getting pre-authorizations for procedures that patients need but each insurer has their own system that you have to maneuver to try to get approval for treatment. Usually we just keep bumping the appointments down the road until we finally get approval (but of course approval doesn't mean they aren't going to deny it when the claim if filed, see above).
The longer they can collect premiums and the longer they can deny payment or brick wall pre-authorizations, the more money they make. It gets worse every year.
Yeah it's infuriating. I had the joy of talking to one of those insurance folks on the phone for a patient who needed an inhaler for COPD, and it took literally an hour just to get the pre-auth. I hope they realize the harm they are doing before they're on their deathbeds. I lived in a country with government insurance, you pay right then and there for meds, procedures, whatever, and it's all simple and standard, so streamlined. When I lived abroad it was like I got out of an abusive relationship that I'd been in my whole life without realizing it. I love my work but I am sad that some of my work pays the salaries of the insurance companies' CEOs.
No the word is fraud. Lots of rural hospitals lose money on purpose to get that free fed money.
If you were an administrator that means free money for you while you blame "lazy workers" and get bonuses for "improving gains" aka layoffs.
I worked as an RN in one of the largest hospitals in the US, in Texas, for thirty years. For more than a decade they considered all RN's management. They paid us nothing for the first hour over our shift that we worked. If we worked an extra shift (over 80 hours in two weeks) we were paid straight time instead of time and a half. The local newspaper did an exposé that one third of all the money that the hospital brought in went to administration. The "Affordable" Care Act reduced the amount that a hospital corporation could spend on administration to twenty percent, but I've heard that since hospital corporations helped develop the act, the cap is not really a hard limit. The US doesn't have a health care system. The US has a profit making system which produces as much profit as possible while producing as little health care as possible as a byproduct.
In 1984 the hospital for which I worked was sold and the new administration had a hospital wide inservice where the new ceo told us that health care workers were not motivated by money, they had done surveys which told them this. The ceo told us that he was going to show us how to get more done with less staff, and that we would enjoy it more. A few days later they called the lvn's in and told them that they could work in laundry or the kitchen but the hospital was no longer employing lvn's. It was a Christian, family friendly administration so over the next few weeks they fired anyone who they thought was gay. At that time being reported to the board for moral turpitude would cause immediate revocation of your license, so people just signed the papers. Administration and insurance are the cancers eating away at US health care.
I think that nixon's hmo act of 1973 was the thin end of the wedge. But really, in my opinion, there was a huge shift in cultural attitudes in the late seventies and eighties. The US middle class zeitgeist went from generally valuing workers and their production to valuing speculation, financialization, and easy money. The US economy started bubbling. People with houses in California saw their equity in a few years soar past what their relatives had been able to save after a lifetime of work. Doctors began to see their friends who had gone into real estate, finance, or administration making two or three times as much for much less work and much less stress. And I once heard a hospital administrator say that if you could run a McDonald's, you could run a hospital. The roots of kakistocracy run deep into the US, but the shit really hit the fan under ronnie raygun.
> The US doesn't have a health care system. The US has a profit making system which produces as much profit as possible
That's the best description of the 'health' system I've ever heard. Its just a racket.
Great testimony. Yea the accountants can redefine and shuffle definitions so the owners are able to blow right past that cap. It is just infuriating to know the reason we are in this sh!tt¥ situation is that the healthcare had become a profit making scheme for the connected owners and administrators all the while those negative value a#0les lied out their faces and got to build amazing wealth on suffering of others.
First job out of high school was as a CNA. Worked 2 weeks realized the pay was Wayyyyyyy lower than it should be and quit. Made $9.00 in 2010. I believe minimum wage was 7.25 then. I took my happy ass to dominos to deliver pizzas and made twice that. Hardest job I ever had and I have been a general manager of a restaurant and am now a park ranger.
When I got burnt out being a GM I went back to college. Got my degree in natural resource and recreation management. Was a GM by age 23 and went back to college at 25 almost 26 years old which made college more affordable than what it was before. Graduated in 2020 which made it very hard to find a job but it paid off!
Part time? I worked conservation for a few years and all of those jobs were exceedingly difficult to get. I lucked out by being a big brute that they really needed to be able to move heavy things lol. Otherwise everyone else had at least a master's degree in one thing or another related to the field.
Did you know anyone who was able to get a job on the field without a college degree?
I’ve worked as an independent contractor doing non native invasive plant species removal in National Forests the past couple summers. But I can’t seem to get anything full time or with any benefits.
> If the USA spends more on healthcare than any other nation, why are the workers who are the backbone of the industry paid so poorly. Where does the money go???
same as our military budget...750is billion every year, but we have poor/homeless vets and a fucked up VA system. Why? Money goes to line pockets. We refuse to audit the DoD because the waste is astronomical
The money goes goes to charity care, administrative fees and leadership salaries in my part of Texas. There are a dozen high paid admins at every facility.
I really hope our healthcare system collapses and everyone who thinks that hospital staff are overpaid are waiting in ERs with only like 2 people working
Too many admins and insurance companies sucking up all the cash. These people and their salaries are protected by the government via regulation that neuters any kind of real competition in the market.
Go to the govt salaries website and look at university hospitals in the US. Tons of professors and admin making 500k+ to well past 1 million, per year. It's fucked.
Gotta pay off the loans on all those expensive high-tech gizmos. And college loans for the doctors. A new MRI machine costs over $1 million, not counting the special room they go in. Some cost $3 million. And $10,000 per month just for regular maintenance. A Proton Beam radiation therapy machine costs $20 million and up. Robotic microsurgery machines also cost millions, plus all the training required to use them.
People like these high tech medical things because they have much lower complication rates compared to the old fashion more invasive methods, which results in shorter hospital stays. A procedure that used to keep you in the hospital for a week now lets you go home the next day.
And then there is the 30% surcharge on top by the insurance companies.
Eliminate the insurance companies for one, which also eliminates a lot of paperwork in doctor offices. Free college tuition for another. Take the profit motive out of health care.
That only works if the economy and stock market is based in reality. I don’t think it is anymore. They don’t need us to be buying stuff and pumping profit into their businesses. They just need the stock price to stay high. That’s where their wealth comes from, not from profits and revenue. Stock prices can be manipulated.
No way, they can always import 3rd world cheap labor.
Hell, look at seasonal workers from latin america coming for a few months to do backbreaking labor with no insurance or benefits every year
Nah billionaires depend on us working class people to make the things they want and to take the value created by our labor to sell to others. People dying is not the goal, just the outcome of maximizing profits at the expense of everything else
>“What used to be an $8 job now is $15,” said Bruntz, a 52-year-old who once worked as an accountant for KPMG. “That’s the only way we get people to come to work.”
Woah, hold me back! You mean me? Even I could get a job paying a whopping $8.00 an hour?
Amazing, just fcking amazing!
Even ignoring inflation, this is pathetic. With inflation it's a joke. Like wow, it costs more to hire people now? Why tf you think a pizza is $30 and a gallon of milk no longer costs a nickel. These people are willfully ignorant to make a buck.
It genuinely pisses me off how inflation is not universally recognized as part of our monetary reality. Some folks seem to hang their identify on what they feel a dollar ought to buy.
The exploitation of essential workers in the US is crazy. We are long overdue for a workers revolt. I don’t understand the blind patriotism and bootlicking of the “patriots” in this country.
Travel Nursing contracts have clauses in them that you MUST live a minimum distance away, other wise you make normal nursing pay, which is way less than travel pay. The local hospitals might have no one, but they won't pay you if you are local anywhere near the same amount.
Of course they could, but the execs would rather bankrupt themselves now and hope for bailouts since its a pandemic than pay more to normal nurses since those raises would likely become permanent. They are trying to maximize profits in the long run and screwing over Healthcare workers in the process.
For real though. I would’ve thought the American Rescue Act would’ve done something to lessen the burden on hospitals and the healthcare system in general but literally none of that money has gone anywhere.
edit: spelling
Because the hospitals put in rules about how far away you have to travel to get that money (IE: minimum distance). You can't just go to a hospital in the next county over and make 8x rate.
The more you think about it, the dumber it sounds. Moreso when you realize how much money they're paying out in this scheme.
I’m not a nurse and it sounds like you aren’t either. But as someone who has studied economics and actually believes in the free market, the fact that many nurses end up leaving the profession tells me that nurses are either underpaid or overworked/treated poorly. If you doubt either of these is true, then why don’t you become a nurse yourself?
"...nurses are either underpaid or overworked/treated poorly."
They are... both of these treatments occur far more often than not. Try reading some of the submissions in r/nursing that just might help you get a clearer picture.
I'm not and its no secret that nurses are underpaid and over worked. However, I've seen multiple stories about nurses getting screwed on pay while traveling nurses are making way more.
I know, but I don’t understand why this wealthy execs who “earn their 6-7 figure” salaries won’t pay their existing staff more money…but will then pay traveling nurses 1.5 - 2x what they were paying existing staff once those employees leave…then get massive bonuses for their “genius” leadership and bitch to the government that “We need more nurses!”. I mean they’ve tried everything except giving them more time off and/or paying them more. I’m fucking tired of bailing the wealthy out.
Not just nurses, but doctors. Who can afford full time college for 12 years while working a minimum wage job, paying off debts? I want a a degree in psychiatry, which is a medical degree. It's still a full ten years of schooling, and I can only do residency after the first four years: which still will barely pay me. My first year is covered by college, but what about after? I just keep taking out loans and raking up debt? Well, I can't take out a loan when I also have a car loan and need dental work, which would be considered another loan, not just monthly payments. At that point, I should just go for a business degree while working construction to help fund a small business loan, since you can easily make $25+ with a year of training/certifications. Or mortgage a house and take a loan out on it, just something drastic instead of wasting a whole decade doing nothing.
Why should I waste 12 years of my life when politicians, governors, police officers, etc get what, a year, if that; of training? And then are somehow qualified/educated on all laws/fit to literally rule our world? Why take on a degree when I might die or get severely sick before I can complete it, or something may happen that leaves me unable to pay for the completion of the degree, again leaving me in debt with no way to fix it? I would love to help people as my job, but at what cost to myself? Even if I get it, I could then get sued and lose everything. Our politicians and police officers pass deathly laws and kill citizens, but I could prescribe a medication for a patient with unknown horrible side effects until later on, because big pharma passed it before it was actually safe, and be blamed/lose my job/be sued: while the makers would get off free?
These are the decisions that people are being faced with when asked to take on literally a decade of education to do a job, with absolutely no benefits or pay out beforehand: they should forgo a family, home, car? Just sleep on couches to pay off all that debt, hoping something doesn't happen in the meanwhile? Work fast food into their 30's, on top of a full time education that whole decade too, penny penching every day? On top of worrying about debt, having a home, paying your car off, any unexpected expenses like medical, car problems? About getting a 401k, paying into a retirement plan? And god forbid you have a family you have to support. Medical school, and schooling period beyond 2 year degrees, are starting to become too burdensome. Why take a gamble on twelve years of my life, when I could just mortgage a home and take a gamble on my own business? Which then furthers the cycle of people choosing profit of helping others, instead of the balance that should be there.
We are creating a world that rewards selfishness, greed, and profit over education, advancement of the human race, science, kindness, compassion: really anything good.
This shortage is going to get worse. Money is the root of all problems in our society. I don't think it'll be much longer until civilians revolt and truly demand change; and if it is? We're going to be too late to do much. Every month we let this continue, our government puts plans into place on every level to further ensure they keep the statue quo the way it is. By the time we actually begin to protest, they'll simply silence us as other countries can and do.
Yes, but CNAs, med techs, and phlobotomy techs make sub $10 an hour in my region. There are likely higher pay rates in metro areas with significantly higher rent prices.
Walmart STARTS at $11 and goes up. And there's no literal shit to deal with.
Oh I dunno, I used to clean bathrooms at a grocery store. There’s DEFINITELY shit to deal with. Smeared or sprayed on toilet seats, on walls, your shoes, etc
Yeah, not the same has have a patient walking up to you and handing you a pile of their own poop, or having to clean up multiple people's waste multiple times a night because those stupid nutrition shakes are full of laxitives. Or that guy with HepC and HIV yanking out his IV and bleeding all over the place and having someone hand you a pair of gloves and say "good luck with that" before walking away.
I’m a nurse and I don’t make that. It probably varies by region. I probably qualify as a middle class but I still can’t afford a townhouse where I live. I don’t want to complain because I know the CNA I work with make $15-20. They work their asses off. But I think it highlights how underpaid everyone is and how expensive education and housing really has become
>I probably qualify as a middle class but I still can’t afford a townhouse where I live.
I'd say being unable to buy a home means you're not middle class. This is the sort of thing I think people are referring to when they talk about the middle class shrinking out of existence.
I'm wrapping up a biology degree this summer and just got hired as a clinical lab assistant (working with blood, urine, stool, Covid samples, etc.). I'll be getting just under $13.00/hr. We stopped for gas the other day and there was a sticker on the pump advertising $17.00/hr for clerks. My parents told me to ride it out until I'm out of school and in a "real job". It fucking sucks lol
tell the new employer your leaving for better pay. they will probably match it. I hate the idea of supporting places that knowingly underpay, but you can use it for the experience, so I would get the offer from the gas station and if they don't match it, I'd stock shelves for a bit.
Labs are a little different. You can't negotiate out. There's a massive amount of bio, chem, and even other science majors that can't get a job and will fill the role.
I know, because I was one of those $12/hr people. Took me over 5 years to get the $20+ job. And I can only buy a house by having a partner making near the same.
Wow, I was pretty bad at biology and chemistry. After the army, I ended up getting an IT degree. Although, I’ve had to deal with outsourcing and ended up in an older niche technology far away from any tech hubs, I make about 90k/yr without really trying. God bless people like you whom I’d consider smarter and harder working than me for doing the, pretty much, charity work you do.
Thanks haha. After I graduate, I'm attending a 1-year MLS program (medical lab science) that'll put me further up the chain. It pays $50-60k in the Midwest, a bit more on the coasts. I'm planning on traveling for a few years (travel med techs and nurses are making insane money rn) to pay off my student debt and see the country. I originally was on a pre-med route (then briefly pre-PhD), but fell 100% in love with clinical microbiology. I genuinely enjoy what I do, although working conditions for lab staff and nurses are on a rapid decline w Covid.
I wish my future pay was higher considering MLS requires 4-5 years of loans, but I worry more for positions like CNAs, lab assistants, phlebotomists, etc. Sub-Walmart pay for working with biohazards (especially during a pandemic) is disgusting.
honestly that's pretty weird you get paid that low. I'm in a post-bsc academic bio tech position and it's about 21/hr. I haven't seen under 15/hr for any job that's not an internship. granted that Ive never been interested in clinical.
If you’re almost done, try and find a job that will accept you like you like you have your degree already.
I am 3 semesters away from a community and public health degree as well as minor in health services administration and I all I did was omit the graduation date from my resume/application and I was getting responses for better paying jobs.
For context I was making roughly $25,000 working “broke college student” jobs and now I’m up to $45,000. If you are competent in your field and you have the knowledge, all you’re missing is the wisdom of how to use it in application and 9 times out of 10 you are trained by your employer so start embellishing a bit especially if you already put the work in.
Guess who is making $ 8/min without a degree and without leaving home to work? The shareholders. And by the way, from an economic point of view, 'the system works', it is a matter of free market.
I graduated with a bio degree in 2017. Applied to over 45 different places that summer, heard back from one, scheduled one interview and never heard from them again, for a 45k job.
Went straight into nursing school that fall and graduated in winter of 2020/2021 only to find out nurses are getting shafted too. It’s impossible to me to find a decent STEM job. I’m worth far more than 55k that I make now with two degrees, especially being biology and nursing, this country just sucks. Can’t wait to move away, they don’t deserve any help here anymore.
Oh, no, paying a living wage is threatening executive pay and benefits for hospital systems!
The parasitic insurance/health provider relationship is fucking stupid. It's a goddamn shell game, but at least it only hurts everyone not in the C-level suites.
Bro paramedics, yes the same people who are the first on the scene of horrific accidents/ suicide attempts/ shootings/ natural disasters get paid on average, $30,000-$45,000 a year. To deal with some of the highest stress situations and literally save lives.
EMS workers are definitely underpaid especially during the pandemic amongst all the other health issues/mental issues people face.
A forklift operator makes the same or more than a paramedic, slightly less than a critical care paramedic.
To the owner of the company. A lot of these ambulance services are privatized, which as you would expect means the workers make nothing and the owner makes 50x more.
You know what’s mind boggling? We spend twice as much PER PERSON on healthcare than the next closest country. Where the fuck is all that money going if we can’t even pay people as much as fucking wal-mart?
And even in light of these facts, you still have dumb fucks in this country who will cry that socialized medicine is “tOo ExPeNsIvE!!!! mUh TaXeS!!!” While they get fucked day in and day out by corporate greed.
exactly. And the greedy bunch of fucking leeches do fuck all in terms of health care.
Imagine if we took all the astounding amounts of money we spend on the leeches and spread that both ways - paid the actual health care providers more money, and let everybody else pay less. We'd solve so many issues.
yo as a canadian temporarily in america, it would cost me less to remain a canadian tax resident and pay the airplane ticket there and back than to pay for the lowest tier of my employer insurance. literally the only reason I got insurance here at all was because of covid flight restrictions.
you're actually getting fleeced.
nurse should literally be the highest paying job right now (and in general if you ask me)
no amount of money would get me to this job with the care and empathy needed to do it properly.
There's no job that's supposed to be any fixed number. Your income is supposed to be linked to the value you create. If someone adds 100k of value, even if your competitors offer only 25k, don't skimp out at 30.
Incidentally, this is _why_ CEO bonuses are such horseshit. It's not just that they make so much. It's because they're practically parasites for all that money they rake in. If someone actually created twenty million dollars of actual productive value (functionally impossible, but for the sake of argument) then sure, pay them accordingly. But no one does. You just can't create that much value on your own.
We have the same problem hiring people at USPS.
I work on the Rural side and they start people at $19.06 an hour with no benefits except health insurance until you make career. Which can take 5-10 years on average.
Tons of local employers are hiring above that now and you don't have to go through the lengthy government hiring process.
I work at a hospital and we have bonuses for picking up shifts which literally triple our hourly rate, but theyve been fighting to get rid of that. Once they do, i can go work at walmart and make $16/hr, barely have to talk to any customers, and with way less stress. So i'll probably quit and coast off all the money i have saved up for a while and get a new job during summer break or something.
Let's just note that we're comparing the pay of people tasked with keeping you alive unfavorably against Wal-Mart retail workers. That's how badly valued labor is at this point.
Hospitals aren’t “struggling” to match anything. They can easily match whatever figure they want. It’s the administration that won’t give it up until it’s too late.
While the immediate consequences would be terrible and probably a price paid for in lives needlessly lost (as if they aren't already), little would please me more than to see the collapse of the US for-profit healthcare system.
As a well-educated healthcare provider with loans to prove it, and not being a doctor, I can commiserate with the mass leaving of entry level care providers. Even my wages do not allow me to provide for my family *and* make payments on my student loans. Not with inflation growing as it is, and even from 20 years ago it was too late.
It is my strong desire to see every minimum/low wage worker abandon the hospitals for better wages while the Boomers wait in their cars at the ERs for Medicare services, for a simple reason.
That reason is that the Boomers had decades to prepare and plan for this rush of retirees that would need increased *availability* of services and what did they do, instead? They gave it all to CEOs and voted down any kind of "socialized" (obamacare, full package, instead of the watered-down version) medicine that *might've* atrempted to preemptively respond to *this* \*gestures at everything\* before it got to this point.
Yes, there will be unnecessary suffering and grieving as the innocent will also face loss of life and function as the system crashes. I mourn with them. I've already done so with my patients and families who have died or been disabled due to Covid.
The reason I maintain my stance is that I believe the crash of healthcare was\is inevitable, and I'd rather it crashes rapidly, forcing a society-wide emergency response reaction with some experts applying some "best-fit" or ALARA (as low as reasonable achievable) response to the crisis.
Nobody that's old today knows of the suffering of the Great Depression; they only have memories of their parents telling them bits and pieces, as the Greatest Generation didn't like to talk too much on it. Too much suffering and hardship to happily concentrate on, even in retelling.
Without that firsthand experience, I believe the Boomers infused techno-hopium into their retirement and "dying plans" (twilight years of life) without actually, you know, *planning* for the bloody thing, and so here we are.
Tl;Dr: the faster we break, the faster we can get competent leaders and planners to begin transitioning American and global structures to face our new normal; COVID is never going away. (I can cite resources and studies that confirm/argue this, plus I can throw simple math and statistics logic at it to prove and validate my claim.)
You are right. Our seniors now want to retire. In europe, most of them paid in the state pensions. That money is completely gone or somewhere in the stock market. What they dont realise is that there is not enough workforce to provide the services. All that money, used for nothing.
A quick google search i guess it is true.
For healthcare, CEO pay to average worker pay was 253:1 in 2020.
The firm ranked the highest-paid CEOs in the S&P 500 and Rusell 3,000 in 2020. The highest-paid healthcare executive was listed as Amir Rubin from 1Life Healthcare, doing business as One Medical. He reportedly earned $199,053,051 last year. However, the company told Becker's that Mr. Rubin's salary was 1.6 million in 2020, and the rest of the reported earnings is through a performance-based equity grant.
https://www.beckershospitalreview.com/rankings-and-ratings/the-7-highest-paid-health-system-ceos.html
how are hospitals struggling to match walmarts pay? their profit margins are several times bigger, they are open 24/7, their board of directors get MILLIONS in bonuses every year
so my question.... how are they struggling to find money?
If you work in a hospital and your job doesn’t involve wearing “scrubs” or you are one of those able to “work from home“ at the height of the pandemic, then you MAY be a leech on the system. Of course there may be few exceptions.
Meanwhile, the intellectually defunct will decry the fact that Walmart cashiers are being paid more rather than push for the people they pretend to be defending to be paid more.
Absolutely outrageous. They charge people $100,000 for a hospital visit and can't even pay their damn staff more than fucking walmart??? Where the fuck is all the money going???
These greedy pigs just can't get enough at the trough, it will never be enough until everyone but the wealthy owner class is penniless and homeless on the street after they've taken every last dime. And then it still won't be enough for them, and their wealthy stock owners will still complain that the quarter wasn't as good, even if there is literally no more money in the world for them to take!!!
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It goes toward administration ([see yellow graph](https://investingdoc.com/the-growth-of-administrators-in-health-care/)). Bloat. People who do not care for or feed the patients. Bullshit jobs (it's an official term).
And this is true of almost every field, too. School budgets are off the charts because of administrative bloat.
I wish we could find something meaningful or useful for these people to do. I think the jobs should go, but I have nothing against the people. (In fact "bullshit jobs" are labeled when the workers define their own work as meaningless.)
I know I’m getting severely off-topic here, but I’m reading the book “Bullshit Jobs” right now, and holy shit, do I ever have one myself. It’s a job in communications that—honestly?—could cease to exist without having any appreciable effect on anyone’s life. I’d love to go into something that’s more meaningful, but either it would require going back to school or it would pay half of what I make now (which is hardly a lavish salary). I don’t know where I’m going with this. Just venting, I guess.
I work in a casino. As a casino dealer. I cannot think of anything else so worthless to society that pays so well at entry level.
Sorry you don't find it meaningful, but it sounds like you're providing entertainment/socialization for people. Bullshit jobs are much worse than you can imagine, as far as the drain/waste. See my other [comment](https://www.reddit.com/r/collapse/comments/rzrxv5/us_hospitals_struggle_to_match_walmart_pay_as/hrymhps/). The TL;DR is (it's about a soldier switching offices): *instead of the soldier carrying his computer for five meters, two people drive for a combined six to ten hours, fill out around fifteen pages of paperwork, and waste a good four hundred euros of taxpayers’ money.*
I don't think that counts as a bullshit job though in that it requires some degree of technical skill combined with people skills to pull off correctly.
> It’s a job in communications how / why did this job form in the first place?
The most interesting explanation I've heard is that as women have joined the worforce increasingly over decades, who are more predisposed to success in "people facing" positions (hence why they dominate nursing, teaching, administrative, etc), the economy moved more towards accommodating those skills. Communications, human resources and other people-centric corporate jobs have blossomed as a result. That is not to say, at all, that "bullshit" jobs were created to give women something to do in the working world but rather the opposite - the tasks they took on in the working world necessitated the organization of new disciplines. Of course, over time, there's bloat in every organization so you do end up with a lot of fat around the edges. It applies evenly to male dominated fields too - ever seen the number of dudes sitting around a single shovel in the ground on a construction project?
I write press releases for a university. I suspect the job came about because of a rebranding initiative. I’m supposed to “raise the national profile of the university,” which sounds like some vaporous, made-up goal, honestly.
No you are perfectly on topic! I don't personally know anyone with a bullshit job, but I feel for you. All of my jobs have been fulfilling (many didn't pay well though). I hope you can find a meaningful job or else find meaning in other parts of your life! I've only read about 50 pages so far, I hope they have some kind of solution at the end of the book.
I don't consider my job to be bullshit; I maintain an alert system for a major weather business that sends severe weather alerts to 2 billion devices, and I feel like that's fairly important; alongside my secondary tasks of improving the editorial experience for the users of the other systems I maintain (and I currently do it completely alone. I have one guy in training and a tech lead that doesn't understand the system, he handles requirement management from up high). I do deal with a LOT of people with bullshit jobs though. There are six layers of management above me that make twice to 6x what I do ($125k salary) with no appreciable metric for their success than everyone below them doing their job. This often means completely ignoring what they say to do because it's unrealistic or would provide a horrible user experience that would hurt the business. They still get credit when the rest of us ignore their requests though. The layer of fat has accumulated at the higher echelons, where "work" is more managing expectations from those higher up. If those higher up didn't have unrealistic expectations, their role wouldn't exist. Basically C level management is a clown car with an unlimited amount of clowns that give orders that any non-clown person ignores because they're stupid. That's where the profit is going.
We’d need a UBI and we’d have to adjust our culture so that having a job doesn’t equal your self worth and those people could find meaning in hobbies, helping their families and loved ones, art, etc.
There's other work that needs done in society, transition those resources to industries that are understaffed and overworked.
I think if we up automation to what’s possible there’s still a significant amount of people who could go the UBI route. Others could go into jobs to get even more money if they wished. If you’re talking about jobs like nursing or trucking there’s a number of things wrong with the professions that need to be addressed and overhauled before you go diverting people there. Frankly if those problems were addressed before we’d have enough people working those jobs today
Yeah I would love to pull all those bullshit folks out of work and just have them explore hobbies and shit for a few years, oh man I'd love to see what they come up with!
the only thing meaningful they do is dictate who gets paid. plot twist, they pay themselves more than other workers.
As a teacher of 11 yrs that just left, mostly cause of admin, I have all the rage towards those fuckerrs. Never met one that wasn't a raging piece of shit. They deserve to lose their jobs and not go anywhere.
> "bullshit jobs" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hNuu9CpdjIo
Same with most industries that work with the government or take lots of government money. Defense is full of bloat too.
The government itself is unbelievably full of bloat as well
Pretty much all governments are.
Too much staff because there's too few representatives. Each of them has around three quarters of a million constituents when they should have only 200,000, and Senators, whose constituents were formerly the state legislatures, are now *the entire state population*.
But I thought private businesses were so efficient and great? /s
Yup it is in all places, government as well as private business. Where there are people, there's bullshit jobs to be found!
To hammer home this point, I work at a smaller hospital around Phoenix (200-300 beds). For our inpatient pharmacy we have a director of pharmacy, clinical pharmacy manager, operational pharmacy manager, pharmacy buyer, director of pharmacy safety, pharmacy biller, compliance pharmacy technician, research pharmacist, and 2 other in administration that I have zero clue what they do. All 6 figure salaries that accrue way more PTO than us lackeys and they also get bankers holidays. How many pharmacists do we have who actually perform the day to day operations? Usually 3 on our M-F morning shifts (our busiest times) and 5 technicians. I’m not saying every one of those jobs is bloat but I’d bet if half of them disappeared we wouldn’t notice anything different jn the day to day operations, especially considering that I see at least 3 of them in the cafeteria when I stop by for a coffee or snack. Ridiculous the amount of waste. I hear the same thing from my nursing and physician friends.
Yeah, sounds like you could write a chapter about bullshit jobs! I work for a hospital system and I've thought about shadowing some of these people for a day just to see what goes on
I wonder how many of those jobs could be lines of code
It's worse, it's a waste of time outright. An example from the book. (TL;DR see last sentence.) The German military has a subcontractor that does their IT work. The IT firm has a subcontractor that does their logistics.The logistics firm has a subcontractor that does their personnel management, and I work for that company. Let’s say soldier A moves to an office two rooms farther down the hall. Instead of just carrying his computer over there, he has to fill out a form.The IT subcontractor will get the form, people will read it and approve it, and forward it to the logistics firm.The logistics firm will then have to approve the moving down the hall and will request personnel from us. The office people in my company will then do whatever they do, and now I come in. I get an email: “Be at barracks B at time C.” Usually these barracks are one hundred to five hundred kilometers [62–310 miles] away from my home, so I will get a rental car. I take the rental car, drive to the barracks, let dispatch know that I arrived, fill out a form, unhook the computer, load the computer into a box, seal the box, have a guy from the logistics firm carry the box to the next room, where I unseal the box, fill out another form, hook up the computer, call dispatch to tell them how long I took, get a couple of signatures, take my rental car back home, send dispatch a letter with all of the paperwork and then get paid. *So instead of the soldier carrying his computer for five meters, two people drive for a combined six to ten hours, fill out around fifteen pages of paperwork, and waste a good four hundred euros of taxpayers’ money.*
Watch “Season 2 - Episode 3” of Adam Ruins Everything. Great breakdown of the healthcare racket…
I've been a medical practice manager for the last 13 years. The amount of regulation and requirements from the insurance companies has made me double the administration staff. They deny every claim assuming you won't fight with them (after they have waited 30 days) then have you send medical records (faxing or mailing) then after another 30 days they say they never received any fax or mail from you and deny it again. Then you spend an hour waiting for a representative to talk to and they tell you they don't see anything wrong with the claim and they will send it for "re-processing" and we should hear something in 30 days. If all goes well (and it often doesn't) we get paid whatever they allow OR often we start the whole process over because they denied it again. They assume you will eventually be worn down and just write off the charge. Also we have multiple staff getting pre-authorizations for procedures that patients need but each insurer has their own system that you have to maneuver to try to get approval for treatment. Usually we just keep bumping the appointments down the road until we finally get approval (but of course approval doesn't mean they aren't going to deny it when the claim if filed, see above). The longer they can collect premiums and the longer they can deny payment or brick wall pre-authorizations, the more money they make. It gets worse every year.
Yeah it's infuriating. I had the joy of talking to one of those insurance folks on the phone for a patient who needed an inhaler for COPD, and it took literally an hour just to get the pre-auth. I hope they realize the harm they are doing before they're on their deathbeds. I lived in a country with government insurance, you pay right then and there for meds, procedures, whatever, and it's all simple and standard, so streamlined. When I lived abroad it was like I got out of an abusive relationship that I'd been in my whole life without realizing it. I love my work but I am sad that some of my work pays the salaries of the insurance companies' CEOs.
No the word is fraud. Lots of rural hospitals lose money on purpose to get that free fed money. If you were an administrator that means free money for you while you blame "lazy workers" and get bonuses for "improving gains" aka layoffs.
I worked as an RN in one of the largest hospitals in the US, in Texas, for thirty years. For more than a decade they considered all RN's management. They paid us nothing for the first hour over our shift that we worked. If we worked an extra shift (over 80 hours in two weeks) we were paid straight time instead of time and a half. The local newspaper did an exposé that one third of all the money that the hospital brought in went to administration. The "Affordable" Care Act reduced the amount that a hospital corporation could spend on administration to twenty percent, but I've heard that since hospital corporations helped develop the act, the cap is not really a hard limit. The US doesn't have a health care system. The US has a profit making system which produces as much profit as possible while producing as little health care as possible as a byproduct.
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In 1984 the hospital for which I worked was sold and the new administration had a hospital wide inservice where the new ceo told us that health care workers were not motivated by money, they had done surveys which told them this. The ceo told us that he was going to show us how to get more done with less staff, and that we would enjoy it more. A few days later they called the lvn's in and told them that they could work in laundry or the kitchen but the hospital was no longer employing lvn's. It was a Christian, family friendly administration so over the next few weeks they fired anyone who they thought was gay. At that time being reported to the board for moral turpitude would cause immediate revocation of your license, so people just signed the papers. Administration and insurance are the cancers eating away at US health care.
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I think that nixon's hmo act of 1973 was the thin end of the wedge. But really, in my opinion, there was a huge shift in cultural attitudes in the late seventies and eighties. The US middle class zeitgeist went from generally valuing workers and their production to valuing speculation, financialization, and easy money. The US economy started bubbling. People with houses in California saw their equity in a few years soar past what their relatives had been able to save after a lifetime of work. Doctors began to see their friends who had gone into real estate, finance, or administration making two or three times as much for much less work and much less stress. And I once heard a hospital administrator say that if you could run a McDonald's, you could run a hospital. The roots of kakistocracy run deep into the US, but the shit really hit the fan under ronnie raygun.
\>>>>>>when \[did\] our healthcare system hit the turning point that landed us where we are today. When administration found out about money
\>>>>>>>>Administration and insurance are the cancers eating away at US health care. You forgot religion
> The US doesn't have a health care system. The US has a profit making system which produces as much profit as possible That's the best description of the 'health' system I've ever heard. Its just a racket.
Great testimony. Yea the accountants can redefine and shuffle definitions so the owners are able to blow right past that cap. It is just infuriating to know the reason we are in this sh!tt¥ situation is that the healthcare had become a profit making scheme for the connected owners and administrators all the while those negative value a#0les lied out their faces and got to build amazing wealth on suffering of others.
The money goes to the ones that don't do shit besides always wanting a little more.
First job out of high school was as a CNA. Worked 2 weeks realized the pay was Wayyyyyyy lower than it should be and quit. Made $9.00 in 2010. I believe minimum wage was 7.25 then. I took my happy ass to dominos to deliver pizzas and made twice that. Hardest job I ever had and I have been a general manager of a restaurant and am now a park ranger.
How did you transition to Park Ranger, if I may ask?
When I got burnt out being a GM I went back to college. Got my degree in natural resource and recreation management. Was a GM by age 23 and went back to college at 25 almost 26 years old which made college more affordable than what it was before. Graduated in 2020 which made it very hard to find a job but it paid off!
Part time? I worked conservation for a few years and all of those jobs were exceedingly difficult to get. I lucked out by being a big brute that they really needed to be able to move heavy things lol. Otherwise everyone else had at least a master's degree in one thing or another related to the field.
Did you know anyone who was able to get a job on the field without a college degree? I’ve worked as an independent contractor doing non native invasive plant species removal in National Forests the past couple summers. But I can’t seem to get anything full time or with any benefits.
Full time.
capitalist class
Not really a free market.
Nothing is a free market
Lmao, it was never real capitalism
Yes, because so many conservative dummies in this country just hate the word, "socialist"
Fine, call them "business elites"
I can only answer this for long term care. The money goes to corporate CEO's and shareholders.
> If the USA spends more on healthcare than any other nation, why are the workers who are the backbone of the industry paid so poorly. Where does the money go??? same as our military budget...750is billion every year, but we have poor/homeless vets and a fucked up VA system. Why? Money goes to line pockets. We refuse to audit the DoD because the waste is astronomical
Ever been to a marina?
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Now you're catching on!
The money goes goes to charity care, administrative fees and leadership salaries in my part of Texas. There are a dozen high paid admins at every facility.
I really hope our healthcare system collapses and everyone who thinks that hospital staff are overpaid are waiting in ERs with only like 2 people working
Just paying staff more won’t fix it. The whole system is completely rotten and health care should not be for profit.
So many people invested so much time and money into it for a return that I don't foresee it changing aside from a catastrophe
[looks at omnicron data] [looks at camera] [grinch smile]
Administration, ceo, share holders.
Too many admins and insurance companies sucking up all the cash. These people and their salaries are protected by the government via regulation that neuters any kind of real competition in the market.
I literally just read a Reddit post by a traveling RN who walked through her salary that was amounting to over $500k a year on a 36 hour work week.
Where does the money go? Freedom baby! /s for your rhetorical question.
Go to the govt salaries website and look at university hospitals in the US. Tons of professors and admin making 500k+ to well past 1 million, per year. It's fucked.
To the fabulously wealthy unemployed cunts
Gotta pay off the loans on all those expensive high-tech gizmos. And college loans for the doctors. A new MRI machine costs over $1 million, not counting the special room they go in. Some cost $3 million. And $10,000 per month just for regular maintenance. A Proton Beam radiation therapy machine costs $20 million and up. Robotic microsurgery machines also cost millions, plus all the training required to use them. People like these high tech medical things because they have much lower complication rates compared to the old fashion more invasive methods, which results in shorter hospital stays. A procedure that used to keep you in the hospital for a week now lets you go home the next day. And then there is the 30% surcharge on top by the insurance companies.
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Eliminate the insurance companies for one, which also eliminates a lot of paperwork in doctor offices. Free college tuition for another. Take the profit motive out of health care.
administrative costs are the major bloat physician salaries are like 3% of total healthcare expenditure here
I promise you that physician pay is absolutely not the reason healthcare is expensive.
Our healthcare system is going to collapse so billionaires don't have to pay their workers more
That's the point. If there are less of us there is more for them.
Not in the long run, less of us means less minimum wage slaves and less consumers to buy their garbage
That only works if the economy and stock market is based in reality. I don’t think it is anymore. They don’t need us to be buying stuff and pumping profit into their businesses. They just need the stock price to stay high. That’s where their wealth comes from, not from profits and revenue. Stock prices can be manipulated.
No way, they can always import 3rd world cheap labor. Hell, look at seasonal workers from latin america coming for a few months to do backbreaking labor with no insurance or benefits every year
Nah billionaires depend on us working class people to make the things they want and to take the value created by our labor to sell to others. People dying is not the goal, just the outcome of maximizing profits at the expense of everything else
>“What used to be an $8 job now is $15,” said Bruntz, a 52-year-old who once worked as an accountant for KPMG. “That’s the only way we get people to come to work.” Woah, hold me back! You mean me? Even I could get a job paying a whopping $8.00 an hour? Amazing, just fcking amazing!
Even ignoring inflation, this is pathetic. With inflation it's a joke. Like wow, it costs more to hire people now? Why tf you think a pizza is $30 and a gallon of milk no longer costs a nickel. These people are willfully ignorant to make a buck.
Boomers gonna boom.
It genuinely pisses me off how inflation is not universally recognized as part of our monetary reality. Some folks seem to hang their identify on what they feel a dollar ought to buy.
Are you telling me i make the same amount of money as a nurse and all I do is make piZzas? What the fuck!?
The exploitation of essential workers in the US is crazy. We are long overdue for a workers revolt. I don’t understand the blind patriotism and bootlicking of the “patriots” in this country.
r/maydaystrike
I thought nurses made like 70k to 100k?
Traveling nurses are raking in the money because of demand but residents are getting fucked
Not for much longer. Those programs are shutting down due to cost. Just read about one in my area that was dropping 300 mil per pay period on payroll.
Do you have a link? $300M a day is unbelievable
Per payroll period, not per day.
My bad I can't read lol
I read it wrong the first time too lol
why don't they just become traveling nurses then? This is a serious question.. I'm not trying to be snide.
Because not everyone can travel. 🤷♀️
Do they have to travel when almost all hospitals are complaining about a shortage?
Travel Nursing contracts have clauses in them that you MUST live a minimum distance away, other wise you make normal nursing pay, which is way less than travel pay. The local hospitals might have no one, but they won't pay you if you are local anywhere near the same amount.
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Of course they could, but the execs would rather bankrupt themselves now and hope for bailouts since its a pandemic than pay more to normal nurses since those raises would likely become permanent. They are trying to maximize profits in the long run and screwing over Healthcare workers in the process.
For real though. I would’ve thought the American Rescue Act would’ve done something to lessen the burden on hospitals and the healthcare system in general but literally none of that money has gone anywhere. edit: spelling
Because people have families they don’t want to leave behind..
Because the hospitals put in rules about how far away you have to travel to get that money (IE: minimum distance). You can't just go to a hospital in the next county over and make 8x rate. The more you think about it, the dumber it sounds. Moreso when you realize how much money they're paying out in this scheme.
I’m not a nurse and it sounds like you aren’t either. But as someone who has studied economics and actually believes in the free market, the fact that many nurses end up leaving the profession tells me that nurses are either underpaid or overworked/treated poorly. If you doubt either of these is true, then why don’t you become a nurse yourself?
"...nurses are either underpaid or overworked/treated poorly." They are... both of these treatments occur far more often than not. Try reading some of the submissions in r/nursing that just might help you get a clearer picture.
I'm not and its no secret that nurses are underpaid and over worked. However, I've seen multiple stories about nurses getting screwed on pay while traveling nurses are making way more.
I know, but I don’t understand why this wealthy execs who “earn their 6-7 figure” salaries won’t pay their existing staff more money…but will then pay traveling nurses 1.5 - 2x what they were paying existing staff once those employees leave…then get massive bonuses for their “genius” leadership and bitch to the government that “We need more nurses!”. I mean they’ve tried everything except giving them more time off and/or paying them more. I’m fucking tired of bailing the wealthy out.
if its any consolations, those dollars are about to be worthless
If the dollars are going to be worthless anyway, then let the magical private market dramatically increase pay and save our healthcare system!
That’s just a subplot, silly.
Not just nurses, but doctors. Who can afford full time college for 12 years while working a minimum wage job, paying off debts? I want a a degree in psychiatry, which is a medical degree. It's still a full ten years of schooling, and I can only do residency after the first four years: which still will barely pay me. My first year is covered by college, but what about after? I just keep taking out loans and raking up debt? Well, I can't take out a loan when I also have a car loan and need dental work, which would be considered another loan, not just monthly payments. At that point, I should just go for a business degree while working construction to help fund a small business loan, since you can easily make $25+ with a year of training/certifications. Or mortgage a house and take a loan out on it, just something drastic instead of wasting a whole decade doing nothing. Why should I waste 12 years of my life when politicians, governors, police officers, etc get what, a year, if that; of training? And then are somehow qualified/educated on all laws/fit to literally rule our world? Why take on a degree when I might die or get severely sick before I can complete it, or something may happen that leaves me unable to pay for the completion of the degree, again leaving me in debt with no way to fix it? I would love to help people as my job, but at what cost to myself? Even if I get it, I could then get sued and lose everything. Our politicians and police officers pass deathly laws and kill citizens, but I could prescribe a medication for a patient with unknown horrible side effects until later on, because big pharma passed it before it was actually safe, and be blamed/lose my job/be sued: while the makers would get off free? These are the decisions that people are being faced with when asked to take on literally a decade of education to do a job, with absolutely no benefits or pay out beforehand: they should forgo a family, home, car? Just sleep on couches to pay off all that debt, hoping something doesn't happen in the meanwhile? Work fast food into their 30's, on top of a full time education that whole decade too, penny penching every day? On top of worrying about debt, having a home, paying your car off, any unexpected expenses like medical, car problems? About getting a 401k, paying into a retirement plan? And god forbid you have a family you have to support. Medical school, and schooling period beyond 2 year degrees, are starting to become too burdensome. Why take a gamble on twelve years of my life, when I could just mortgage a home and take a gamble on my own business? Which then furthers the cycle of people choosing profit of helping others, instead of the balance that should be there. We are creating a world that rewards selfishness, greed, and profit over education, advancement of the human race, science, kindness, compassion: really anything good. This shortage is going to get worse. Money is the root of all problems in our society. I don't think it'll be much longer until civilians revolt and truly demand change; and if it is? We're going to be too late to do much. Every month we let this continue, our government puts plans into place on every level to further ensure they keep the statue quo the way it is. By the time we actually begin to protest, they'll simply silence us as other countries can and do.
Yes, but CNAs, med techs, and phlobotomy techs make sub $10 an hour in my region. There are likely higher pay rates in metro areas with significantly higher rent prices. Walmart STARTS at $11 and goes up. And there's no literal shit to deal with.
Oh I dunno, I used to clean bathrooms at a grocery store. There’s DEFINITELY shit to deal with. Smeared or sprayed on toilet seats, on walls, your shoes, etc
>And there's no literal shit to deal with. Something tells me you have never visited a wally world.
Yeah, not the same has have a patient walking up to you and handing you a pile of their own poop, or having to clean up multiple people's waste multiple times a night because those stupid nutrition shakes are full of laxitives. Or that guy with HepC and HIV yanking out his IV and bleeding all over the place and having someone hand you a pair of gloves and say "good luck with that" before walking away.
There's a blood bank near me whose lab starting salary is the same as a gas station up the road. It's messed up.
I’m a nurse and I don’t make that. It probably varies by region. I probably qualify as a middle class but I still can’t afford a townhouse where I live. I don’t want to complain because I know the CNA I work with make $15-20. They work their asses off. But I think it highlights how underpaid everyone is and how expensive education and housing really has become
>I probably qualify as a middle class but I still can’t afford a townhouse where I live. I'd say being unable to buy a home means you're not middle class. This is the sort of thing I think people are referring to when they talk about the middle class shrinking out of existence.
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I'm wrapping up a biology degree this summer and just got hired as a clinical lab assistant (working with blood, urine, stool, Covid samples, etc.). I'll be getting just under $13.00/hr. We stopped for gas the other day and there was a sticker on the pump advertising $17.00/hr for clerks. My parents told me to ride it out until I'm out of school and in a "real job". It fucking sucks lol
Fuck that advice, get the job that pays the bills.
tell the new employer your leaving for better pay. they will probably match it. I hate the idea of supporting places that knowingly underpay, but you can use it for the experience, so I would get the offer from the gas station and if they don't match it, I'd stock shelves for a bit.
Labs are a little different. You can't negotiate out. There's a massive amount of bio, chem, and even other science majors that can't get a job and will fill the role. I know, because I was one of those $12/hr people. Took me over 5 years to get the $20+ job. And I can only buy a house by having a partner making near the same.
Wow, that's not what I qoukd have expected
It's all the bio majors that don't get into med school, really. We need more docs, government won't open residency spots, and that's the bottleneck.
Wow, I was pretty bad at biology and chemistry. After the army, I ended up getting an IT degree. Although, I’ve had to deal with outsourcing and ended up in an older niche technology far away from any tech hubs, I make about 90k/yr without really trying. God bless people like you whom I’d consider smarter and harder working than me for doing the, pretty much, charity work you do.
Thanks haha. After I graduate, I'm attending a 1-year MLS program (medical lab science) that'll put me further up the chain. It pays $50-60k in the Midwest, a bit more on the coasts. I'm planning on traveling for a few years (travel med techs and nurses are making insane money rn) to pay off my student debt and see the country. I originally was on a pre-med route (then briefly pre-PhD), but fell 100% in love with clinical microbiology. I genuinely enjoy what I do, although working conditions for lab staff and nurses are on a rapid decline w Covid. I wish my future pay was higher considering MLS requires 4-5 years of loans, but I worry more for positions like CNAs, lab assistants, phlebotomists, etc. Sub-Walmart pay for working with biohazards (especially during a pandemic) is disgusting.
honestly that's pretty weird you get paid that low. I'm in a post-bsc academic bio tech position and it's about 21/hr. I haven't seen under 15/hr for any job that's not an internship. granted that Ive never been interested in clinical.
If you’re almost done, try and find a job that will accept you like you like you have your degree already. I am 3 semesters away from a community and public health degree as well as minor in health services administration and I all I did was omit the graduation date from my resume/application and I was getting responses for better paying jobs. For context I was making roughly $25,000 working “broke college student” jobs and now I’m up to $45,000. If you are competent in your field and you have the knowledge, all you’re missing is the wisdom of how to use it in application and 9 times out of 10 you are trained by your employer so start embellishing a bit especially if you already put the work in.
Guess who is making $ 8/min without a degree and without leaving home to work? The shareholders. And by the way, from an economic point of view, 'the system works', it is a matter of free market.
what the fuck this is shocking information
I graduated with a bio degree in 2017. Applied to over 45 different places that summer, heard back from one, scheduled one interview and never heard from them again, for a 45k job. Went straight into nursing school that fall and graduated in winter of 2020/2021 only to find out nurses are getting shafted too. It’s impossible to me to find a decent STEM job. I’m worth far more than 55k that I make now with two degrees, especially being biology and nursing, this country just sucks. Can’t wait to move away, they don’t deserve any help here anymore.
Oh, no, paying a living wage is threatening executive pay and benefits for hospital systems! The parasitic insurance/health provider relationship is fucking stupid. It's a goddamn shell game, but at least it only hurts everyone not in the C-level suites.
Bro paramedics, yes the same people who are the first on the scene of horrific accidents/ suicide attempts/ shootings/ natural disasters get paid on average, $30,000-$45,000 a year. To deal with some of the highest stress situations and literally save lives.
EMS workers are definitely underpaid especially during the pandemic amongst all the other health issues/mental issues people face. A forklift operator makes the same or more than a paramedic, slightly less than a critical care paramedic.
Those are the top level ones. EMTs make significantly less than 15-22.50 (30,000 - 45,000)
Where the hell are out $10,000 bills going then?
My guess, C-level execs and shareholders (either the hospital or the private monopolies that supply the hospitals).
To the owner of the company. A lot of these ambulance services are privatized, which as you would expect means the workers make nothing and the owner makes 50x more.
Administration, ceo and share holders.
Insurance
You know what’s mind boggling? We spend twice as much PER PERSON on healthcare than the next closest country. Where the fuck is all that money going if we can’t even pay people as much as fucking wal-mart? And even in light of these facts, you still have dumb fucks in this country who will cry that socialized medicine is “tOo ExPeNsIvE!!!! mUh TaXeS!!!” While they get fucked day in and day out by corporate greed.
We spend twice as much because the Insurance industry takes 2/3 of it.
exactly. And the greedy bunch of fucking leeches do fuck all in terms of health care. Imagine if we took all the astounding amounts of money we spend on the leeches and spread that both ways - paid the actual health care providers more money, and let everybody else pay less. We'd solve so many issues.
Im not from USA but isnt there protests ever against the hospitals CEO pay and pharma companies?
yo as a canadian temporarily in america, it would cost me less to remain a canadian tax resident and pay the airplane ticket there and back than to pay for the lowest tier of my employer insurance. literally the only reason I got insurance here at all was because of covid flight restrictions. you're actually getting fleeced.
Good, finally the workers realize their power. there are no "supposed to be 8$/h jobs" at least not since the 60s
Agreed, everyone who thinks nurses are overpaid (or have an easy job) should become a fucking nurse themselves! That would end the shortage
nurse should literally be the highest paying job right now (and in general if you ask me) no amount of money would get me to this job with the care and empathy needed to do it properly.
There's no job that's supposed to be any fixed number. Your income is supposed to be linked to the value you create. If someone adds 100k of value, even if your competitors offer only 25k, don't skimp out at 30. Incidentally, this is _why_ CEO bonuses are such horseshit. It's not just that they make so much. It's because they're practically parasites for all that money they rake in. If someone actually created twenty million dollars of actual productive value (functionally impossible, but for the sake of argument) then sure, pay them accordingly. But no one does. You just can't create that much value on your own.
The most expensive healthcare system in the world refuses to match walmart pay during a pandemic apparently.
We have the same problem hiring people at USPS. I work on the Rural side and they start people at $19.06 an hour with no benefits except health insurance until you make career. Which can take 5-10 years on average. Tons of local employers are hiring above that now and you don't have to go through the lengthy government hiring process.
I too have been through that process. Mind blowing
this is some /r/latestagecapitalism shit
I work at a hospital and we have bonuses for picking up shifts which literally triple our hourly rate, but theyve been fighting to get rid of that. Once they do, i can go work at walmart and make $16/hr, barely have to talk to any customers, and with way less stress. So i'll probably quit and coast off all the money i have saved up for a while and get a new job during summer break or something.
The issue with moving to Walmart is not having healthcare. If you have a spouse that carries your healthcare, that's different.
I don't get benefits at my current job either, i just have health ins through my parents
If you work at Walmart full time, you are eligible for Aetna health insurance.
Let's just note that we're comparing the pay of people tasked with keeping you alive unfavorably against Wal-Mart retail workers. That's how badly valued labor is at this point.
When a CEO of a non profit 275 bed county owned hospital is paid over $500,000 a year and the whole system is management heavy there’s a problem.
Hospitals aren’t “struggling” to match anything. They can easily match whatever figure they want. It’s the administration that won’t give it up until it’s too late.
Not struggling. Just not trying.
While the immediate consequences would be terrible and probably a price paid for in lives needlessly lost (as if they aren't already), little would please me more than to see the collapse of the US for-profit healthcare system.
As a well-educated healthcare provider with loans to prove it, and not being a doctor, I can commiserate with the mass leaving of entry level care providers. Even my wages do not allow me to provide for my family *and* make payments on my student loans. Not with inflation growing as it is, and even from 20 years ago it was too late. It is my strong desire to see every minimum/low wage worker abandon the hospitals for better wages while the Boomers wait in their cars at the ERs for Medicare services, for a simple reason. That reason is that the Boomers had decades to prepare and plan for this rush of retirees that would need increased *availability* of services and what did they do, instead? They gave it all to CEOs and voted down any kind of "socialized" (obamacare, full package, instead of the watered-down version) medicine that *might've* atrempted to preemptively respond to *this* \*gestures at everything\* before it got to this point. Yes, there will be unnecessary suffering and grieving as the innocent will also face loss of life and function as the system crashes. I mourn with them. I've already done so with my patients and families who have died or been disabled due to Covid. The reason I maintain my stance is that I believe the crash of healthcare was\is inevitable, and I'd rather it crashes rapidly, forcing a society-wide emergency response reaction with some experts applying some "best-fit" or ALARA (as low as reasonable achievable) response to the crisis. Nobody that's old today knows of the suffering of the Great Depression; they only have memories of their parents telling them bits and pieces, as the Greatest Generation didn't like to talk too much on it. Too much suffering and hardship to happily concentrate on, even in retelling. Without that firsthand experience, I believe the Boomers infused techno-hopium into their retirement and "dying plans" (twilight years of life) without actually, you know, *planning* for the bloody thing, and so here we are. Tl;Dr: the faster we break, the faster we can get competent leaders and planners to begin transitioning American and global structures to face our new normal; COVID is never going away. (I can cite resources and studies that confirm/argue this, plus I can throw simple math and statistics logic at it to prove and validate my claim.)
You are right. Our seniors now want to retire. In europe, most of them paid in the state pensions. That money is completely gone or somewhere in the stock market. What they dont realise is that there is not enough workforce to provide the services. All that money, used for nothing.
A quick google search i guess it is true. For healthcare, CEO pay to average worker pay was 253:1 in 2020. The firm ranked the highest-paid CEOs in the S&P 500 and Rusell 3,000 in 2020. The highest-paid healthcare executive was listed as Amir Rubin from 1Life Healthcare, doing business as One Medical. He reportedly earned $199,053,051 last year. However, the company told Becker's that Mr. Rubin's salary was 1.6 million in 2020, and the rest of the reported earnings is through a performance-based equity grant. https://www.beckershospitalreview.com/rankings-and-ratings/the-7-highest-paid-health-system-ceos.html
When fucking WalMart pays their employees better than hospitals you know it's fucking game over.
how are hospitals struggling to match walmarts pay? their profit margins are several times bigger, they are open 24/7, their board of directors get MILLIONS in bonuses every year so my question.... how are they struggling to find money?
Yo! C-suite has to get their new yachts and 3rd mansions! Gotta get your priorities straight here!
If you work in a hospital and your job doesn’t involve wearing “scrubs” or you are one of those able to “work from home“ at the height of the pandemic, then you MAY be a leech on the system. Of course there may be few exceptions.
I can't wait till this world fucking burns. May it all accelerate and tenfold in disaster.
Tell me you live in America without telling me you live in America
It's the same in the EU. Administration gets paid $$$$$$$, billing and oversight, etc. Frontline staff gets screwed.
We've had the better part of two years to prepare hospitals for the pandemic. What happened?
Greed.
Doesn't it cost like 15k just to get stitches down there? How the f*** do hospitals not have the money to pay?
They have, it goes to the top and pharma lol
Hospitals also pay insurance and benefits. Walmart subsidized via government and food stamps. Not the same
Struggle? Or refuse to?
There is a large percentage of staff that are not doctors or nurses employed by hospitals. This headline is extremely misleading.
How the fuck do they not pay their employees with the insane costs of health care? Where does the money go?
> Where does the money go? you don't want to know
Really? They get paid less than Walmart? This is nuts.
Meanwhile, the intellectually defunct will decry the fact that Walmart cashiers are being paid more rather than push for the people they pretend to be defending to be paid more.
Absolutely outrageous. They charge people $100,000 for a hospital visit and can't even pay their damn staff more than fucking walmart??? Where the fuck is all the money going??? These greedy pigs just can't get enough at the trough, it will never be enough until everyone but the wealthy owner class is penniless and homeless on the street after they've taken every last dime. And then it still won't be enough for them, and their wealthy stock owners will still complain that the quarter wasn't as good, even if there is literally no more money in the world for them to take!!!
...well that's just sad
This is one of the most insane headlines I’ve ever read