Nurse Salaries Skyrocket Due to Covid- Will They Remain?

The latest article in the Wall Street Journal has covered the incredible rise in salaries among nurses due to the Corona pandemic.

While millions of people lost work, lost money, and had their finances wiped out, the nursing profession has was lucky in that they profited.

Nurses saw a minimum across the board increase of over 100 percent. In some locations such as California, New York, Chicago and other large cities, nurses would fly in and make 10 thousand dollars a week.

To be sure, those Travel nurses were the rarity. Many local nurses were only making 90 or 100k a year, not the huge sums of money that were found in hotspots like New York and California.

It is not just nurses who have seen a huge increase in salaries. Travel companies are being used to fly travelers in multiple specialties around to large cities. Certified Nursing Assistants, Licensed Practical Nurses, Ultrasound Techs, and many other clinical workers are being paid increased rates due to Covid pandemic.

However, nurses draw most of the attention from newspapers because they are the highest paid, and they are in the most demand.

Will Nurse Salaries Stay This High?

No. Not for the long run. In the short run, yes. Government funding has added billions of dollars to healthcare spending. Most of that money flows into contractors, pharma, and hospitals.

Nurses are aware of this and so they have collectively demanded higher and higher rates.

Many nurses walked away from full time jobs to take jobs as traveling nurses. The hospitals were then left with a nurse shortage which needed to be filled, and so other traveler nurses were brought in to staff the empty slots.

Of course, multiple things are going to happen to cause nurse salaries to fall.

First of, thousands of new nurses are joining the workforce all the time. In years past, nursing was seen as a low paying profession, so it did not attract as many people.

Now, however, nurses openly talk about their huge salaries. So there is much more of an incentive to become a nurse.

The process is not that difficult, and with student loans becoming easier to obtain, anyone can go to nursing school and become a nurse. There are even online nursing schools for people who are working full time as CNAs or other medical staff.

This influx of nurses will cause there to be less of a perceived nurse shortage.

Second, with the advancement of medical technology, most nurses will be outsourced. This will obviously take a long time, but computerization will replace many nurses.

In the short term, the end of covid will also be the end of covid bonus money. Nurses who were making ten thousand dollars a week will not want to go back to their old salaries, but without billions of dollars in government aid, there is no way that hospitals can continue to pay inflated salaries.

Will There Be a Cap on Nurse Salaries?

It’s unlikely. There would be too much bad press. Nurses have been able to be in front of most news stories and have excellent public relations and a good image in the media.

Even though there is critique regarding the endless dancing nurse TikTok’s, especially when patients were dying and nurses were being paid more than most working professionals, the fact is that they have a very good image.

Should the hospitals try and cap their pay, nurses would rightly go on strike and then the hospitals would have to immediately cave.

The expense to bring in travelers would defeat the purpose. No, there will in all likelihood not be an official cap. Pay will simply begin to lower.

Travelers will chase the highest pay, though, as some cities such as LA,NYC, Chicago will continue to pay premiums to attract nurses to their overburdened city hospitals.

Does This Inflate the Cost of Healthcare?

Some critics of nurses and their extremely high salaries might say that it does inflate the cost of healthcare. However, the larger issue is the ballooning budgets for government funded hospitals. Much of that money does not go to nurses. Instead, the corporate backers, and executive level staff are pulling in the really large figures.

More crushing are the contracts that are dolled out to various business and corporations that are connected to friends and political partners of these hospitals. That’s where the real money is. Huge contracts for renovation, delivery, service providers, billing, sanitation, and countless social service programs.

The millions are not going to induvial nurses, but rather LLC’s, Non-Profits, and companies’ setup often for the sole reason to do business with the hospital.

Hospitals are often times the biggest employer in the city they are in.

Then there is the whole other conversation to be had regarding the price of pharmaceuticals. That’s a highly politicized conversation, and it is one worth having, but it should be noted that pharmaceutical companies do make enormous profits, and that is where a great deal of the money does.

There’s reason that pharmaceutical sales reps are so highly paid.

How Does This Impact Nurse Recruiters?

Nurses pay does impact recruiting. The higher the demand for nurses, the more revenue that staffing agency owners and recruiting companies make.

It’s important to remember that recruiters make very small commissions when compared to the staffing agency owners. Think of it like this. For every dollar in profit an agency pulls in, a recruiter might get a nickel, or less.

Nurse recruiters will be impacted when there is less of a demand for nurses. If hospitals stop needing to hire staffing agencies to find nurses, then staffing agencies lose business.

However, the demand for nurses is not going to drop anytime soon. Why? Because the population continues to grow, and people are living less healthy lives when compared to years past.

So, large cities will continue to have over crowded hospitals, nurses will be overwhelmed and want to take time off, and hospitals will need to pull in travelers and per diem nurses.