I agree. Same thing with truckers driving to long. Part of it is the culture. The worst is when they get out of medical with residency and such. Its that frat type of. I had to do it so so should they.
this post was submitted on 25 May 2026
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There's a number of factors at play and rest is only one of them. Other factors are cost cutting in hiring and risk of information loss or error during patient transfers.
I'm disabled, have lived an entire year in the hospital such that they unofficially named a room after me on floor 5 and: this is the triple that I am okay with them working. Sitting in a chair, sleeping and making sure the psych/trauma surg patient doesn't escape. That's it. And honestly, it should be a hammock. I have this idea for a business hammock. Maybe I could sell hospital hammocks.
Doubles, I'm only good with them in emergencies. And having been the cause of a few emergency shift doubles in my day, I appreciate those of you willing to pull them. Those of you pulling triples, go to sleep. If your third shift isn't one of the above sleeping shifts you're intentionally taking unnecessary risks that are going to kill someone.
The best justification I've heard is that every time you change doctors or nurses at a shift change you introduce discontinuity of patient care. Meaning more opportunity for error. I'm not saying it's a good justification, just the best I've heard.
Because health care is a service and not profitable except when selling Drugs. Thats the unethical incentive behind addiction and the opioid crisis.
I think basically everyone, if you ask them directly, would agree with you. The issue is cost disease. In order to continue attracting workers to the medical profession, institutions must raise wages. Raised wages means more cost for the institution. But no medical institution gets a blank check to run its operations. So institutions are constantly looking for ways to save money, which often means hiring fewer people and making their existing workers work longer hours.
Medical institutions make billions, the CEO rates are insane. They don't have to be
According to some random googling I did, the largest health care provider in the USA is HCA Healthcare. In 2025, their CEO made $26,456,606. Meanwhile, they had 316,000 employees in 2024. If the CEO were fired, that would mean each employee could be paid an extra $866 per year. The company's total salaries and benefits came to $32.2 billion in 2024, averaging $107,333 per employee. Firing the CEO could result in hiring an additional 260 full time employees, increasing the number of employees in the company by 0.08%.
So based on this napkin math, you can be opposed to CEO pay on an ideological basis - but not on the basis that it would have a non-negligible impact on this specific issue.
It's not so much the CEO's direct pay. It's what they are paid to do. CEOs generally get paid to maximise shareholder dividends and stock value, which leads to them doing anything they can to minimise the staff's wages, and minimising the staff in general, to keep down costs, especially in something where inputs and outputs are not strictly correlated, like medicine, where you can't hire 10% more nurses and expect to get 10% more patients paying bills. The CEO's work probably hurts everyone involved except for the shareholders, but it increases profit margin so they do it.
This is a fair enough critique of the US system.
But to the topic of "why are medical staff overworked?" we see this in countries other than the US as well. Typically because even if institutions arent trying to maximize shareholder value, they are still having to make due with limited funds allocated to them by the government in the face of rising (or potentially rising) healthcare worker wages.
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averaging $107,333 per employee
That is far, far, far greater than the average of their CNAs, nurses, custodial staff, basically the bulk of their workforce is either at or near minimum, or making around half that if they're the higher paid chunk of the vast majority of the workforce. I'm willing to bet the top 10% makes close to 90% of the wages
I mean, it also seemed high to me. My guess is
- Employee benefits (like, ironically, medical) are more expensive for the company than we would assume, but aren't included in nominal worker pay.
- The company subcontracts out its lower wage work, like custodial staff or CNAs. So it ends up paying a bunch of doctors $200k per year, and twice as many nurses $50k per year. Assuming this custodial staff don't count in the metric I found, since they aren't on payroll. And we could argue that CEO pay could be directed to them as well.... but then we are just splitting the pie more ways.
Of course, if you have some proof that 90% of those wages are going to 10% of earners in the company, I'm all ears. But I kind of doubt it.
Hospitals shouldn't be "making money" directly. They are there to heal people. A healed worker is an indirect gain to the economy. Good care and good prevention mean a stronger, fitter, and more productive society.
I bet that the better the care a hospital provides, the less recurring patients it will have and the quicker it will be able to release patients.
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ITT: Everyone is exploited, but not as badly as my profession is. Stop crying.
FFS, it's because it's better to see patients in most cases over a 24-48 hour period to track theor progress. It's about setting patterns in symptoms and recovery. I've asked doctor friends of mine the same question. One said they also get to see rare surgeries, and "if I need to do this surgery on you one day 10 years from now, would you rather I've never seen it? Or seen it once at the end of a 48 hour shift?"
Everyone claiming "capitalism!" is an idiot that needs to get some therapy.
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Unfortunately the caregivers will do this to themselves where they are allowed to because the other option is no one is on staff to give Health Care to people who need it :| most places in the US there is a shortage of healthcare providers and nurses, and unfortunately our government could give a fuck less about fixing that
It's ok to overwork them as long as you thank them for their service.
Because the results of malpractice only kill, maim, or injure one person at a time.
In aviation, however, the consequences are much more visible; so commercial pilots have regulated limits to flight duty.
E: What I mean to say is I am not ok with this, but what happens is it’s easier for politicians to ignore. It should not be this way, and the current practice of ridiculous hours for the medical profession is properly fucked. Aviation has flight duty limits precisely because it has affected so many at once. In the industry they say that the regulations are “written in blood”.
Funnily enough, those duty cycle limits played a significant role in history's worst aviation accident: The collision of 747s at Tenerife.
The short version of the story: There was some bomb threat at a European airport, so traffic bound there had to divert to wherever else they could. A lot of them ended up landing on the Spanish island of Tenerife, at an airport not used to handling that much large aircraft traffic. This included two 747s full of passengers.
When it was time for them to go, a thick bank of fog had rolled in. The taxiway was apparently not suitable for 747s so they had to taxi down the runway. The first of the two 747s had taxied to the end of the runway and was in position and ready for takeoff. Extremely ready for takeoff; the captain was pre-occupied with a recently tightened air crew duty cycle policy and was anxious to get home before going over his hours.
The second was taxiing up the runway straight toward the first, and had missed a turn off the runway, so they were kind of jackknifed across the runway trying to figure out where they were.
The captain of the first jet decided to take off without clearance from the tower. One 747 under full takeoff power T-boned another 747. Nearly 600 people died.
I'm all for crew duty cycle rules, we shouldn't have exhausted pilots at the controls. Something that has kind of shut my life down is the notion that even our good laws turn poisonous when interpreted with absolute strictness. A pilot afraid of breaking the "You're not allowed to over-work pilots because flying tired is unsafe" law killed 583 people including himself.
The video I linked above calls it "The Worst Air Disaster In History." It's one episode of a long-running series, and they always feel the need to come up with some similar line, so some of them are "The worst single-aircraft disaster involving a non-American made plane operated by an American airline to take place during daytime." I think my favorite quote from the show was during the Cross Air CFIT episode, "On board was Passion Fruit, Germany's answer to the Spice Girls."
Because they're such precious rare exceptional people, we just can't have more of them.