Yes it is. Maybe it is not? (edit, same in the UK). Why is left as an exercise on the blackboard. If you do have elderly parents I would look into the actual costs of facilities near you because you are in for a shock.

However, if you think about it, most people age 40-70 have to keep working and can't afford to slow down to take care of their parents, so they have to outsource it. Keep the job to pay for that care plus all the other expenses of life. It would be nice if I could take a part time job and take care of my parents. But if I quit my full time job, my entire family would be homeless. So, I have to work and pay. Same story for child care, unfortunately. And since it is a for profit sector, the market charges as much as it can, which is always going to be more than you want, and just enough to leave the patient alive for future bleedings.

IDK about other countries, but...

Nursing homes are required to have trained care staff, 24x7x365. For example, check Florida here:

https://www.nursinghomelawcenter.org/news/nursing-home-staff...

If a facility managed to keep their average cost of those state-minimum direct care hours down to $30/hour - that'd still be $40k/year. On top of that, they must have higher-level medical staff, admin. staff, laundry service, 365x3 meals per year of healthy-ish food, and pay for a facility that meets all the legal requirements. (And probably a bunch of other stuff, that IDK about.)

$104k is 1.5x the average salary. That's cheaper than most of the rest of the world. Nursing homes require a low ratio of nurses to patients, and 24/7 coverage means that you need 5x as many nurses to maintain that ratio. Add cooks, cleaners, maintenance, management and all the other necessary staff and it's easy to see that a proper nursing home has more staff than residents.

Double staff costs to account for overhead and you see how $104k is not generous at all.

In the US, there's a continuum of care, from senior living facilities to assisted living to nursing homes.

Nursing homes provide high intensity care to people that are unable to care for themselves, far more than housing. Many of the patients will have significant mobility issues.

Assisted living facilities provide things like optional meals and cleaning services and the like.

Senior living is housing that is relatively designated to older people.

Yea, elderly care is really labor intensive + you have housing etc costs on top of it.

UK nursing home fees are £80k = 103k USD.

It's in line with very high COL countries like Switzerland, but higher than most other OECD countries.

The biggest cost factor is also not the housing itself but care/nursing.

it sounds about comparable with housing prisoners? you pay less in security and more in medical care and on call nurses, I imagine.

that lines up. it's easily 10k to 20k of housing cost, food, medical costs, and a ton of personnel depending on how old they are