Exactly, choosing to cut hours or pay due to a lull in business is a choice made by the employer. It's not like these hospitals are sputtering along right at the fringe of solvency and one bad choice will bankrupt them - private health providers tend to make pretty comfortable profit margins and the fact that they can pay such outrageous surge prices for travel nurses is a pretty clear proof of how much they have to spare.

Many hospitals literally are sputtering along right at the fringe of solvency. This is particularly a problem with non-profit hospitals in poor and rural areas. Summer have shut down in recent years, and the pandemic is accelerating that trend.

https://www.beckershospitalreview.com/finance/12-latest-hosp...

Some hospitals are sputtering right along, and a list of 12 isn't a great piece of evidence that those hospitals (many of which are run by regional organizations which are essentially consolidating patient pools into a central location) are being run effectively - especially if these hospitals are paying 10k/week for travel nurses.

If there's a location that isn't profitable to operate a hospital in then the hospital will probably fail. America is the country still clinging to market-driven healthcare services and the market can be a cruel mistress.

And all that doesn't at all erode the fact that nurses are paid pauper's wages at extremely profitable hospitals - some tech companies are going out of business, some probably closed their doors today... that doesn't mean that all engineers are expected to work for 60hrs/week at $15/hr.

That article was just a recent example. If you search around you can find many other hospitals which have closed down or gone through bankruptcy in recent years.

https://www.gpb.org/news/2022/04/08/wellstar-closing-er-hosp...

https://www.post-gazette.com/opinion/editorials/2022/04/04/c...

In 2020 the US median salary for an RN was $75K. That was well above the median household income. Hardly pauper's wages.

Most hospitals are not extremely profitable. In fact the majority are run by governments or non-profit organizations.

https://www.kff.org/other/state-indicator/hospitals-by-owner...

Tech companies will pay engineers as little as they can get away with. Expectations have nothing to do with it. Wages are set by the market.