More like a lot of people are making a little money each. Take surgical billing at a large hospital. Lets start with 20 operations of $5000 professional fees each. First only 40% of these are ever collected because of insurance underpayment and the fact that a lot of people simply don't pay. so we're down to $40,000. The dean of the medical school now takes 16% off the top to support the medical school so now we're down to $33,600. The hospital charges the surgeon 60% of the collected bill for overhead - support staff OR supplies salaries for anesthesiologists, OR techs, etc. so thats another $24,000. If you subtract this from the 33,600 that's left after the med school gets theirs, then the surgeon gets $9600 for 20 operations or about $480 each. Now the surgeon has to have initial clinic, pre-op clinic, the operation itself, and followup care. Say 2 hours before the operation, 3 hours for the operation, and about 3 hours after the operation for followup the hourly rate that the surgeon gets is about $60/hour. Not a whole lot for the level of training and commitment that the job entails.
The biggest cost is the cost of treating non-payers, so when you see the ER crowded with people who only speak spanish, you can bask in the warm glow of knowing that your money that you're paying for your health care is actually paying for them too. (Thank you Jorje Bush for making the USA the welfare choice for Central America)
Wow, so they'd actually make more working within a framework of socialized medicine! Amazing that the AMA isn't storming the steps of the Capitol demanding gubmint work.
The biggest cost is overhead.
The difference between the facilities and equipment that a hospital had to maintain in 1970 and now is staggering.
DB is complaining that her niece was in a modern ICU with pneumonia for two weeks (and presumably lived), and that it cost $500K.
The cost of having that ICU available 24/7/365, so that her niece, and everybody else's relatives, can drop in at 3:30AM critically ill and survive, is enormous.
And DB doesn't think her niece should have to pay for that cost (as opposed to her actual resource use).
But DB has not answered the question of who that hospital SHOULD send the bill to for weekly maintenance on the ventilators, or for the on-call respiratory therapy staff, or all the other stuff required to have that unit ready for her niece to drop in with pneumonia.
THAT'S the cost problem. It costs tens of millions of dollars to staff, equip, and maintain ICUs and ERs in a ready condition, and no one wants to pay.