It doesn't make sense to compare US wages with UK wages without considering all other factors.
It's more meaningful to compare UK nurse wages to other UK wages. That still shows that nurses are under paid but in a more meaningful way.
Of course the gulf between 30k and 78k is enormous but not many people in the UK are earning 78k, so it's really not meaningful to suggest that's what nurses ought to be earning, that would be in a small minority of earners.
Why can't we compare wages between the two places? I get that there are CoL adjustments you have to make, and that there are government benefits UK citizens get that US people don't. But those aren't unknowable and they probably don't add up to a 100% difference, which the difference here exceeds.
We can compare total compensation (where total includes also benefits/detriments of living in a specific location) fairly. We can't compare wages fairly. That was likely the point. The only numbers thrown around in the original post were wages, not compensation.
NHS benefits aren’t even very good. If you’re a nurse in the US, you likely get employer covered health insurance. In the US, that’s additional compensation. In the UK, that’s coming out of your income through your National Insurance contribution. NHS pension is 1/54 of average salary per year of service. If you average $50,000, you’re looking at $32,000 per year. Ona nurse’s salary you’d get at least $20,000 per year from Social Security. To make up the difference the nurse has to put just $200/month into their 401k.
Certainly the compensation of nurses in the US is higher if measured in monetary terms.
The UK has an entirely different attitude to pensions than the US, and you could write a book about it, so it is hard to make a direct comparison because the expectations are so far apart.
The NHS seems to be capable of attracting nurses from overseas, in my local hospital you could speak Tagalog and get the same experience. The problem recruiting nurses into the NHS is the punitive visa regime, not monetary compensation.
Employer health insurance rarely covers everything, and with how inflated medical costs are in the US you easily end up paying lots of money out of pocket.
The other part of it is that it doesn’t cost an arm and a leg to get a nursing license or degree in the UK, at least not as bad as the US.
It's more meaningful to compare UK nurse wages to other UK wages. That still shows that nurses are under paid but in a more meaningful way.
Of course the gulf between 30k and 78k is enormous but not many people in the UK are earning 78k, so it's really not meaningful to suggest that's what nurses ought to be earning, that would be in a small minority of earners.
Look how fast wages drop off around that level here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Income_in_the_United_Kingdom