Nurses in Hawaii make a LOT of money. According to the Hawaii Medical Association, Hawaii Nurses Association and the Hawaii Business Council, nurses make an average of $97,000 a year. That’s more than the average worker in the state.
The reason nurses make so much is because the cost of living in Hawaii is lower than in most other places (the cost of housing, of course) and nurses are among the few people who get to choose their own hours. Nurses are able to work when they want to work, when they want to work a little longer, or when they want to work longer.
And if you make enough to make it, your paycheck is not taxed.
Nurses in Hawaii are lucky to have a great employer, the Hawaii Department of Human Services. The State of Hawaii has a very low corporate tax rate, which allows us to pay a nice little bit extra for health insurance. We get to choose our premiums, which means we have to pay for more staff to make it work. And it works.
Here’s where the similarities between Hawaii and the U.S. come to light. When we move from the U.S. to Hawaii we have to pay an extra $70 a month for our health insurance. In the U.S. we don’t have to pay that. So our insurance costs us more, but we pay less, because we are paying for it.
In Hawai’i nurses make about $100,000 a year. So that is like a million dollars a year in salary. But it’s only about 2% of the people who work here.
So our nurse makes about $200,000 a year, just in Hawaii. But that extra staff we have costs us about $2,000 a month in Hawaii. So our health insurance is only about 30% of our total cost.
Even though Hawaii’s health insurance premiums are low, it’s still a big burden. When we go to Hawaii for vacation, we pay all of our health insurance. If we go to a doctor’s office, it’s like we don’t pay anything.
Well if we go to a doctor we pay for the visit, if we go to the hospital we pay for the trip, if we go to a hospital we pay for the tests and the medications we need. So its either pay the full price for all of these services or pay very little.
This can also be a problem when we want to get the services of a nurse. We’ve been asking how much we should charge for nursing services. We’ve seen various quotes from the hospital, the clinic, the nursing home, the doctor, etc. and we know that, on average, the nurse would be charging between $2.50 and $6.00 per visit.
