> Large part of this is that much of US healthcare is in the business of earning money or optimizing costs, the care being only side effect. ICUs are not optim

> Large part of this is that much of US healthcare is in the business of earning money or optimizing costs, the care being only side effect. ICUs are not optimized. Hospitals in general are not optimized in the US. A lot of the cost issue is in inefficiency. Many ICU patients cause a hospital to loose money. > As to salaries, I just can't imagine how it is even legal for nurses to do same job but being paid more because they just joined... Salary is what ever a company decides to pay a person. There are all kinds of ups and downs. If you're running financially inefficiently, as most US hospitals are, then you need to limit when you pay people more. When US hospitals have seen a majority of their patients as COVID patients the loss they were talking about lead to bankruptcy speculations. While the predictions weren't right (in terms of timing) there is a lot of good context in https://claytonchristensen.com/books/the-innovators-prescription/ https://claytonchristensen.com/books/the-innovators-prescrip...