The hit film about overworked nurses that's causing alarm across Europe

Overwork, Morale, and Mismanagement

• Multiple commenters across Europe and North America confirm extremely high nurse workloads, worse than in previous decades.
• Some argue it’s less about patients being sicker and more about mismanagement: underpaying and overworking staff while pouring money into large IT systems and bureaucracy that add admin burden but little benefit.
• Stories from Finland and elsewhere describe expensive, poorly suited US health IT systems (e.g., Epic) that staff hate and that eat time better spent on care.

Rising Costs and What Drives Them

• Broad agreement that healthcare costs have risen faster than inflation for decades in many wealthy countries.
• Proposed drivers: aging populations, new tech and therapies, Baumol’s cost disease (labor‑intensive work that can’t be easily automated), litigation risk, and profit extraction.
• Disagreement over how much high clinician pay matters: some highlight very high specialist incomes; others say physician salaries are a modest share of total spending and often overstated.

Aging, Prevention, and Limits of Lifestyle Fixes

• Aging and longer lifespans are seen as core structural problems: even with prevention, people still need expensive end‑of‑life care.
• Healthier lifestyles may improve quality of life and delay disease but don’t obviously cut total lifetime costs; they can even increase spending by extending years lived.
• Some argue society is unprepared for the labor needed as the old‑age dependency ratio worsens.

Automation, Capitalism, and Who Pays

• Baumol’s cost disease is cited as a reason healthcare gets relatively more expensive as other sectors automate faster.
• Debate over how far nursing tasks can be automated: some see many low‑skill tasks as automatable; others stress the intrinsically human nature of much care.
• Broader ideological clash: “healthy capitalism” with strong antitrust vs. skepticism that markets self‑regulate; strong support from some for government as primary guarantor vs. others’ distrust of politics.

Workforce Supply, Training, and Pay

• Many call for expanding medical and nursing training slots, criticizing deliberate or de‑facto caps that keep labor scarce.
• Counterpoint: a larger workforce still needs funding; simply producing more nurses doesn’t help if budgets won’t hire them.
• Dispute over nursing education: some see 4‑year degrees and hard science prereqs as unnecessary barriers; others note multiple existing nursing tiers and argue raising education has improved quality.

End‑of‑Life Care and Cultural Attitudes

• Several healthcare workers describe end‑of‑life care as emotionally and financially devastating: very old, severely debilitated patients kept alive at family insistence, with little hope of recovery.
• Strong sense that societies avoid honest conversations about death; euphemisms and taboo make rational decisions rare.
• Some defend the right to “do everything” if it’s paid for; others argue this wastes scarce resources and prolongs suffering.
• Hospice, DNR/DNI orders, and clearer advance directives are suggested as partial solutions, but family dynamics often override patient wishes.

Value of Care Work and Broader Inequality

• Personal reflections compare hard physical and emotional labor (nursing, moving, trades) with high rewards for those “doing little for much,” reinforcing a sense that care work is undervalued.
• Automation/AGI is framed by some as likely to deepen inequality: many working performatively while a small elite captures the gains.
• Underneath the nursing discussion runs a persistent theme that wealth exists but is poorly and unjustly allocated, with nurses emblematic of workers who “do much for little.”