[trafficante]

What is causing the healthcare staffing issues? Is this all still related to Covid?

Every single healthcare and adjacent person I’ve spoken to in the past year and a half has nigh-universally expressed a sense of impending doom.

My PMC doctor, who I’ve been with since 2017, abruptly quit and left the field entirely. The office is part of a big healthcare conglomerate, but it’s been several months and I’m still being told I won’t have a new official PMC until sometime in the spring of next year!

Feels like something in healthcare is seriously broken with no plans to fix the problem.

[supertrope]

Healthcare is hard to automate. So companies need a lot of labor. Some high wage, but a lot low wage. Offering pharmacy technicians $14/hr in 2019 was enough to be fully staffed. $16/hr in 2023 is not enough to keep the pharmacy open all the time. A lot of people retired early, died, or moved up to better jobs after the Covid-19 pandemic began. The same thing is happening to EMT staffing, doctor's office support staff, hospital support staff, etc.

[peyton]

Aging population + locum tenens price fixing. After health systems grifted insurers by buying doctors, somebody figured out you could just grift health systems directly by renting doctors and not have to bother with the running-a-hospital part.