So why are nursing homes so expensive?
1. And other goods mass manufactured.
So in other words you are covering the loaded labour rate for about 1 salary per occupant.
There's some schadenfreude seeing the boomers complain about getting the enshittification treatment they themselves got rich off.
A shareholder relationship is parasitical and exploitive by it's nature, as defined by Dodge Brothers v. Ford.
Making pension funds feed on that relationship - that is whatever that is. I couldn't call it a necessary evil because it's by design.
People born after 1945 are used to making their own choices and living by their own rules.
Realistically the only way to stabilize the price of caregiving is to automate the hell out of it, like Japan is trying to do. It's a rather dystopian thought that the only way senior care won't bankrupt us is if we have robots do it all, but what can you do.
Labor, who pays a sizeable chunk of their income on rent... and rent, well is rent. Rent is only expensive when demand outstrips supply, and demand keeps being artificially constrained by existing property owners (of which boomers are a large chunk) not willing to take a hit on their property value. Seems like a self-inflicted problem.
it's just that everything else's price dropped (economy of scale, new technology etc.) while nursing stayed as expensive as ever.
The same line boomers enjoyed riding on while their property and other investments went up massively without any effort on their part, at the expense of subsequent generations.
Now, they're getting a taste of their own medicine as someone else (private equity in this case) wants to ride the line going up and even just robbing subsequent generations isn't enough to pay for it.
Boomers coasted off the success of the postwar era, and now we're all poorer for it.
My parents were silent generation and I'm endlessly surprised how little adults of that generation understood about truly basic things, like psychology.
To be fair, they generally parented a few hours a week. That wasn't much, not compared to the 24/7 adulting that was required of my generation (and is now the standard for every gen of parents).
But... With our modern, unsustainable parenting requirements, birth rates are plummeting. More competence, fewer kids.
'Not being wrighted' means a whole lot of boomers won't be getting in-home care, or absolutely terrible minimum "care".
But this started with the Mergers and Acquisitions crisis back in the 80's, and vulture capitalism has really taken off in the last 30y.
Oh, and my SO was a in-home healthcare person. They got paid a WHOLE $14/hr, no benefits naturally. You can probably guess the type and quality of most the candidates and workers. Even a few of them did the petty and felony theft from their dementia/Alzheimer's clients. Not like they'd miss what was stolen :(
You are correct. However, I couldn't see how we could have fixed it before. In the US, every possible group of people was fully mired in a state of
No One Anywhere Wants To Clean Their Own House.
Not so. Or at least not so much. I'm part of the group that's responsible for every atrocity, avoidable disaster and systemic failure in history. Adults.
Adults are also the cluelessly stupid group that endlessly blames teens and kids for crap.