In the UK with NHS shortages it's all about wages though. The time component just means that whenever they finally get the wages figured out it will still take years to improve.
If you really need doctors NOW, bump up the rates as high as they will go. At some point you will either run out of money, or you'll find a doctor somewhere in the world willing to take the 12 hour plane to move to the UK for the 1 million pound an hour wage you're offering them.
Also worth keeping in mind - there's a big difference in "market rate" between "well-treated doctor in a well-functioning health system" and "relentlessly over-worked doctor in a wretchedly crumbling health system". And even if paid well above "market rate", the latter position will attract far fewer applicants who really care about patient welfare and outcomes. And suffer considerably higher turn-over.
Ultimately, it still boils down to “I think you should be limited to making X for doing job Y, because I don’t believe it should be worth as much as job Z, which is clearly prestigious enough to be worth 2X.”
Market forces are a surprisingly efficient means of separating perceived and actual value for pretty much anything, even with some fairly sizeable warts.
Yes and no. A nation like the UK can afford to pay any one doctor millions of pounds. But that solution scales poorly to a national level. And worse if you try to scale it to all the other sorts of essential workers. And when an extremely large, complex system is wretchedly mismanaged - paying the guys in the trenches 10X does not fix that. For example, many of the UK's public buildings were built with "RAAC", and are at risk of collapse: https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2023/sep/04/raac-crisis-...
Meanwhile - a rather large number of HNer's seem to disagree with you about the virtues of those "efficient market forces" when it comes to health care. Perhaps discuss it with them here? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37398504
If you live elsewhere and are surprised to have never heard about this, it’s because it hasn’t been acknowledged yet by the government to save face, but anyone with relatives stuck on a NHS waiting list or who have sadly passed away waiting for an ambulance that doesn’t come already knows this.
Large nominal sums of money are really easy to turn into a negative headline, rather than the cost of using staffing agencies which requires a bit of analysis.
See Brexit for an example. "We're spending £350m per week on this, isn't that mad?!" versus "various analyses and projections show that raising trade barriers and reducing staff mobility will likely have a negative effect on domestic businesses"
Aren't you sorta forgetting the more salient point of this headline? That it was an outright fabrication with no justification or basis in reality?