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Comment by noonespecial | Hacker News Reader

>Great childcare and elder care is very expensive

It's hard even to find a way to buy "Great childcare and elder care". Mostly you end up paying as much as such a thing should cost but the money just goes to people who "administer" minimum wage workers delivering care that is mediocre at best.

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I ran through the numbers when my kid started in childcare. It turned out there wasn't really a grand bureaucratic conspiracy. Instead, mainly labor is just really expensive.

When your kids are still infants, at childcare centers, the caretaker:child ratio can get as high as 1:2. Those caretakers gross nearly $30k/year plus benefits & other employer costs such as FICA & Medicare.

$30k/year is not a lot of money - definitely not enough to raise your own kids on

No, but it does mean that as a parent, if (in this canned example) you are paying $18k/year- while the number initially sounds crazy- nearly all of it is going directly to caretaker compensation, not bloat & largess.

Maybe not, but it's a lot of money for most families to pay someone else to take care of their kids.

Aren't there childcare and elder care agencies that aim at families of different socioeconomic levels? I guess that the rich hire expensive nannies at expensive agencies.

What you comment sounds unlikely to me.

I agree there’s a sourcing/matching problem that leads the administrators in these markets to capture a disproportionately large share of any value premiums paid.

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