Nurses Sound Alarm as 'Uber for Nursing' Apps Push to Deregulate Healthcare

bagels

Seems like illegal wage fixing collusion by employers with the extra step of technology.

Avicebron

Another torment nexus banger.

changoplatanero

Everyone wants healthcare expenses to go down but the biggest healthcare expense is the salaries of providers. So, hard to give the masses what they want without making a smaller group of people who benefit from the status quo angry.

74948494i4

Apparently most hospitals make low margins. If this is true, and the goal is to make healthcare more affordable, something has to give, no? https://www.kff.org/health-costs/key-facts-about-hospitals/?... It is also unclear how this is any different than traveling nurses which operate similarly. What is the solution that doesn’t result in at least some large group of people making less money?

jareklupinski

> A companion Roosevelt Institute brief found that some platforms "use data-brokers to determine nurse debt levels and offer lower wages to those with highest debt loads." thanks free market

thomasdziedzic

Nurses already deserve higher wages than what they already get, but introducing "dynamic pricing" and competition to under-bid each other is just disgusting. Nurses form the backbone of healthcare. Treat them as such. Edit: To those downvoting me, talk to a real nurse and I bet you wouldn't take twice the pay to do half the work they have to deal with.

le-mark

> found that some platforms "use data-brokers to determine nurse debt levels and offer lower wages to those with highest debt loads." We can assume all gig economy companies do this? Brave new world indeed.

buran77

It was only a matter of time and I said (half) jokingly at the time that Uber is breaking the dam for everyone else to follow. Any regulated system will have its day in front of "disruptors" where the disruption is simply ignoring the regulation with some flimsy excuse, supported by the money and lack of morals of VCs and startup combinators. Uber took an axe to taxi drivers which weren't a popular group to begin with so that was easy. With the "disruption" perfected, next up are doctors, nurses, lawyers, electricians, cooks, engineers, the sky is the limit.

0xbadcafebee

The entire 'gig economy' model is exploitation. It only works because of income inequality. It requires a large pool of workers who don't make enough money to support themselves (due to insane healthcare and housing costs, and low wages and benefits) and thus will take any money they can get, despite the poor pay, long hours, and lack of benefits. It's taking a person slowly dying of thirst and offering them a thimble of water in exchange for knitting a sock.

Shank

To what degree is this just another symptom of the US healthcare system being flawed and in need of rework? To what degree would anyone use such a service if the costs remained high? I used Zocdoc in the past to find a doctor and ended up with a doctor who just charged out-of-pocket instead of insurance, and it worked great. Would an app that shows up-front pricing be better for the consumer?

wewewedxfgdf

Tech bros: "It's Uber and Doge for nursing!" Like nurses are just an expense.

CapmCrackaWaka

Could I use this app to hire a nurse and get a diagnosis from home? If we can start getting even meagre medical treatment to skip insurance / other middle men, I could see this having a great impact on healthcare prices, especially since AI is such a good information extractor, which is 90% of the role doctors play anyway.

theo939eirn

To be fair US health care system is sort of similar to old NYC taxi driver cartels before Uber. Just try to get price quote ahead of procedure... Ripe for disruption!

jon128

Does this mean that as a customer I can select only nurses that don't have fake degrees?

dyauspitr

Go ahead and downvote me for this, but the medical field in the US especially when it comes to RNs needs a shake up. This is going to sound very crass, but the only skill that your average person on the street doesn’t have that nurses have is to stick a needle in a vein and that’s something that can be taught to a lay person over a week. Pretty much everything else are skills that any person off the street possesses and we would do well to have a lower bar for entry for it.

newyankee

While I do understand the importance of training, degrees and experience I see that people in the medical field beyond Doctors seem to have a very holier than thou attitude probably because they have 10 edge cases of how MRI can go wrong drilled into them (MRI technicians), not everyone is comfortable with needles and human body (nurses) and because it seems that only Pharmacists can sort and provide us the right medicines when in fact it can be easily done by some robots. In before someone says that your reasoning is flawed because that is very incorrect perception of the field. All I see is that regulatory capture has worked very well here and is simply stopping totally novel and practical ideas which work on tradeoffs from even taking off

phoghed

Uber for talk therapy / psychology is dog shit, I’m sure this will be too.

doomspork

Lord have mercy. The last thing you want is under paid, lower quality nurses. If you're for that, you've never had a hospital stay.

gxs

I feel really conflicted on nurses On the one hand, a good nurse is invaluable. They do the hard work that doctors won’t/don’t do, and can be so kind and generous during your time of need. On the other ones, there are so many who mail it in and are just milking the system Healthcare is so expensive - some nurses are making 500k a year - their union contracts base vary from 200k to 300k for something like 32-36 hours per week On top of that, they can pretty much work unlimited overtime with zero restrictions. They can work enough overtime hours such that they can nearly double their salary. And that’s how you come up with the 500k figure I posted Granted, that’s at the top of the range, I’m talking about somewhere like the Bay Area, and does require a ton of overtime, but those extra 100s of thousands add up. These hours can’t be spread around to minimize the amount of time and a half or double pay paid out, per contract they go in order of seniority This is just nurses and I imagine it’s something similar but with higher rates for specialists like anesthesiologists and still beyond that doctors and surgeons I don’t begrudge anyone’s salaries, but it’s a zero sum game. There’s a reason why, aside from typical corporate profit maximization, you wind up with a 30k bill for a short visit. Even if you account for the lower rates insurance companies pay, it’s still in the thousands of dollars for treatment where you were seen for less than 30 minutes Like I said, to be clear, I don’t begrudge anyone’s salaries - this is just an under discussed point when we talk about healthcare costs Labor is generally reported as 60% of the costs of hospitals - so if you’d ever want to talk about making healthcare affordable you’d have to address this which I feel like is a bit of a taboo subject. Many nurses are in a union which makes it an even more difficult conversation All that is to say, I can see the motivation behind stuff like this, even if I don’t agree with it

tamimio

I am all for it, and hopefully seen in Canada soon too, the smug nurses are literally doing janitorial works and get paid 90k and above, always complaining, very bad attitudes, make it feels like they are doing all the work for free too.. hopefully doctors follow too, the healthcare mafia and their bureaucracy must end, these abysmal waiting times aren’t because of low resources or whatever BS excuses, it’s intentional from doctors/healthcare staff supply all the way to the actual process you get to deal with while being treated or going to ER, it is designed that way.