The nurse's salary is probably less than $50/hour[1]. It's a small fraction of the cost for operating this machine.

[1] https://nurse.org/articles/highest-paying-states-for-registe...

I would expect that a lot of the nurses in these sort of units are the higher paid grades.

Even if the nurse is billed out at $500 an hour you're still only 1/6th of the way to that price.

A senior nurse plus all the supporting staff there will also be the on duty doctors.

I have been in higher risk renal wards and there are lot of people about even at night and that is a much lower risk ward.

I have also been in an ICU which has a lot more staff and I suspect that the USA probably has a higher staff to patient ration than the NHS

According to this BBC article, the average cost of ECMO treatment in the UK is £45,000 per patient:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-wales-45409281

Medical care in the US is seriously broken.

> According to this BBC article, the average cost of ECMO treatment in the UK is £45,000 per patient:

That appears to be a figure per course of treatment, not a figure per a day, so it isn't really directly comparable, unless we know the average duration of treatment as well (which is unlikely to be the same between US and UK)

For our daughter, there was a technician that literally sat next to the machine 24/7. There was never one moment without a technician there. Then there were all the other staff tending to her. The x-ray techs (2x daily x-rays), the respiratory techs, doctors, tons of other equipment and medicines. Our bill was just north of 600k for 10 days on ECMO, medevac, and 4 days in the NICU2 on a respirator.

That's roughly $1800/hr for the stay I think