I’m not particularly sympathetic to retirement home narratives that paint each person as a lonely, incompetent senior wasting away. I witnessed first hand how my mother spent her adulthood partying instead of providing and now it’s become a critical issue for our family to provide for her. Ultimately I don’t expect my children (or staff-journalist) to project pity on me for my circumstances.
I run a weekly route with MealsOnWheels and deliver food/perform wellness checks to many people whom are homebound. There are much worse fates for seniors than a community home with social programs and meal service.
I think it is everyone’s duty to buy long-term care insurance (perhaps the government should provide this, as we will all need it). I also believe you must provide for the retirement you expect.
My company offers one that claims to be reliable (owned by an insurance company that's been around for over 100 years, albeit not in the LTC space).
The one thing I didn't like about them: They don't adjust for inflation. So if you sign up for a $100K plan, you'll get $100K - which will worth a lot less by the time I need it.
The problem with LTC insurance is it’s likely to go belly up and you are at the end of the day dealing with an insurer whose business model involves denying valid claims. All of that is assuming you can actually get LTC insurance. Good luck if you are over 50. It’s like the private form of social security, a Ponzi that’s approaching its moment of truth.
You’re probably correct (I’m 30 and don’t have a policy) but I can’t think of any financial instrument that would guarantee skilled nursing ($4-8k/month in MCoL) for 10-20 years. No one in the bottom 90% of American earners can afford that drawdown even if they saved considerably.
That’s sorta the point, and the problem. There’s a dependency ratio problem brewing: there are simply not enough working-age people to care for the old people who will need care. No amount of financial instruments can paper over this reality - they will just go bankrupt (eg insurance policies, social security) or steadily drop in value relative to the cost of care (401ks and other financial instruments) until the price of LTC equilibrates to actual capacity. Anyone not in the percentile that actually has eldercare capacity will simply have to go without, much like the price of housing has risen to shut out Millennials that are not in the income percentile needed to get one of the few scarce houses for sale.
No worries, the EU (and UK) governments have gone ahead and taken the only real way out of this conundrum: researching robotic labor to take over for this ... and defunded it.
That’s not the only solution, curing dementia would largely solve the manpower issues here.
Rapid population decline is a separate issue that makes this problem seem much worse. In other words, if elderly care works in a steady state population then it’s a symptom here not a cause.
Increasing the retirement age isn’t necessary. It increases overall prosperity in exactly the same way all those things that increase productivity do by allowing you to use extra labor on other problems.
Instead changing demographics means retirement benefits may need to alter their payout formulas, but more prosperity means more money for retirees in absolute terms even if they keep receiving the same percentage of GDP. IE X% of per capita GDP in 2025 is way higher than X% of per capita GDP in 1975 adjusted for inflation easily offsetting increased lifespan. The same is nearly guaranteed in another 50 years.
Most people won't need it for long and so the risks average out to a more reasonable cost. However it is still thousands and people buy cheap not best coverage when they need it so that is what the market provides.
One of my Grandfathers just stopped taking medication and going to the docs. And died quite peacefully within a couple years of retiring. Death and decay is just natural and quick. While my other grandfather has been kept alive 30-35 years post retirement popping a tray full of pills everyday, having gone through dozens of surgeries and has had hopeless quality of life post retirement.
The med-industrial complex is a run-away train that is detached for any moral system. It can't even produce any morality anymore. Because its not efficient or rational to do so :)
Perhaps it's the idea that we all must work full time with 10 days of annual leave until we reach the point of needing pills and medical assistance to live comfortably that is the issue.
It sounds like you have not had much off the record contact with members of the medical community. Perhaps a summary of the beliefs of the community I grew up in would help:
That depends. Retirement as passage into idleness? Sure. Many people who retire piss away the remainder of their lives because they don't know what to do with themselves. They get depressed, and they become lonely, because they become isolated. Children move away, spouses die, friends move away or die. Couple this with suburban planning where you can't do anything without a car (something the elderly are less likely to be able to operate) and where there is no town center, certainly not one congenial to the social life of the neighborhood or town. With the decline in church membership, you don't have that option anymore, one that also dealt with questions dealing with the end of life (if you view death as the absolute end, then your life was hopeless to begin with; retirement and old age simply strip distractions and illusions effectively).
But this is separate from the question of retirement as such, or the question of aging. Your grandfather, I presume, only refused to take medication and medical treatment, which falls under "extraordinary care", and this is morally licit. Had he refused food or offed himself intentionally (or with "assistance"), that would have been a different matter.
Some of us get old and tired. Retirement is a necessity. Your opinion will change with age on this one I expect. retirement has existed really since humans lived past their 40s. (1700s) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Retirement
"If one’s thirties were a decrepit old age, ancient writers and politicians don’t seem to have got the message. In the early 7th Century BC, the Greek poet Hesiod wrote that a man should marry “when you are not much less than 30, and not much more”. Meanwhile, ancient Rome’s ‘cursus honorum’ – the sequence of political offices that an ambitious young man would undertake – didn’t even allow a young man to stand for his first office, that of quaestor, until the age of 30 (under Emperor Augustus, this was later lowered to 25; Augustus himself died at 75). To be consul, you had to be 43 – eight years older than the US’s minimum age limit of 35 to hold a presidency."
"As a result, much of what we think we know about ancient Rome’s statistical life expectancy comes from life expectancies in comparable societies. Those tell us that as many as one-third of infants died before the age of one, and half of children before age 10. After that age your chances got significantly better. If you made it to 60, you’d probably live to be 70."
Neanderthal elders probably took on lighter-duty tasks as they aged just like today's elders do.
Humans have always lived past their 40s. You've misunderstand life expectancy statistics, because human age-at-death forms a bimodal distribution: A lot of kids and infants die (especially historically), and then your body starts falling apart in your 50s. So while the average life expectancy at birth for a lot of history might have been in the 30-40 year span, it has never been common for people to die in their 30s. Because once you make it to ~15, your life expectancy is another 30-40 years. And if you make it to 30, your life expectancy was still another 25-30 years.
Retirees are more likely than not to have built up at least a small pension or 401(k)[USA]: money sitting there earning interest and capital gains. You don't think the Aging Industry is going to just sit around and not try to grab as much of it as they can? They are going to do their best to ensure the system is set up to let them harvest those accounts dry.
Everyone wants to grab whatever seniors have. I've seen it.
Children and other family squabble over the assets even before they pass. You'll see neighbors talking senile/demented seniors into giving away their stuff, or selling it for a silly low price (like a truck for a dollar, or my one neighbor asking my other neighbor for a free fishing boat). Then there's the scam calls...
Yea again, that's not different than anyone else with any other amount of money. For profit corporations are designed from the ground up to separate us from our money (or "milk" if you will).
In reading the article, it doesn't seem to me that anyone is being taken advantage of any more than all of us are when we walk into a shopping mall, open amazon.com, or buy a home.
I know someone who started an elder care business with explicitly this purpose. He stopped working in the more conventional medical system because he saw an opportunity. Unsure how it is going at this point, I haven't checked in recently.
Elder care is hard, and expensive. Friends have worked in various levels of it at various times, from food services on up. There is clearly some good for people to be around a community and there are real needs that require constant attention for some. But there is a drive to do more with less which almost always seems to end up with stories of people not being attended to as quickly as you might hope.
Memory care is particularly difficult, on the family and on the businesses. It is just so all consuming and from the outside it can be hard to know if adequate care is being taken. Of course I do know someone who's mom put her dad into memory care, then moved and basically started a new life with a boyfriend while still married so she had access to the money.
My parent's solution is to day they don't want to draw things out. But I think that is easy to say from a position of health and barring any significant diagnosis there is more of a slow slide to infirmity than a clear juncture to make such a choice. We'll see, my family is close and I expect we will provide care in person. But also life is complicated and that is a ways off.
I mean that's just trivially true right? For profit corporations are designed to maximize profits, therefore they must try to maximize the amount of money they extract from their customers.
And now you know the entire reason the US is consumed by political chaos.
A rational society would be regulating those corporations to ensure they act in the public best interest at least some of the time. We're seeing the result of what happens when we are 50 years behind on that. And the current administration is generally rolling back regulations all over.
Think of the money at stake and it will become obvious that our current situation isn't mere happenstance. The chaos is a deliberate smoke screen -- perhaps not exactly planned by the current administration, but orchestrated by the oligarchs behind the scenes.
As opposed to public companies? Come to Northwest Europe and you'll find a very similar problem: elderly in homes, so incredibly understaffed that there simply isn't anyone to pick up someone who falls for hours.
These days every few months there's a new "accident" reported in these places. They have been destaffed to dangerous levels. Apparently last months' issue was that the administration was wrong. A room that had an elderly person was registered as empty, but had an old lady inside. She starved to death because she was unable to leave the room and "didn't call for help" (probably didn't call loud enough).
Those are generally private companies too, at least in Sweden, I would assume most of the nordics.
That last 20-30 years have seen increasing privatization of services paid for with public funds, in everything from infrastructure, healthcare, eldercare and schools. Of course they maximize profits (maximizing residents, students, patients) and minimize costs (staff, care).
But that is not a property of private industry ... or I should say, it is, but it is not a difference with public industry.
In public industry the name of the game is to maximize subsidy for minimal actual work done. Lots of people, but nothing happens.
If you were alive in the 80s you would have seen this in action. People who "work" ... but not much at all. Many people, but zero activity. I'm told it was much worse in the 60s.
That's the fun part about all of this. Boomers bought their houses for $30k in the 80s and today they're worth $3M. Sounds like they are set up comfortably for retirement and their millennial kids, who are pushing 40 and haven't been able to afford a house yet, are in for a nice inheritance.
Wrong! Because while their house is worth $3M, it will be fully leveraged to pay for the cost of their deathcare. Mom and dad will die broke in a retirement home, and your inheritance will be paying for their funeral out of your own pocket.
Yea, reverse mortgages are yet another underhanded scheme to harvest what remains of the elderly's wealth. Some CEO somewhere said "Well, we've already found a way to drain their health savings, their retirement and pension... what else can we get our hands on?" and poof! The Reverse Mortgage! They're not going to stop until they make debt inheritable, so they can soak the next generation before they even retire.
Oh yeah, and then there's those commercials you see on the channels with a 55+ viewership. They're selling things like this: https://www.ovidlife.com
"Sell Your Life Insurance Policy. Turn your life insurance policy into an immediate cash payout" next to a picture of seniors vacationing on a yacht. Then they bring out Tom Selleck who looks in the camera and says "Would I lie to you? You can trust me!"
I think that saying this is a convenient cover up of the shortcomings of our own culture. I really don't think that in all of human history, there's been no culture having a more healthy relationship with their elderly. I'd even wager that it's pretty easy to find counter-examples.
Exactly. I just tried fact checking the "milking" bit. Looking up lists of care home groups, Allegra Care came up first. Looking at their financial statements (all public, and include full details of profit and loss, thanks to UK company law), their profit in 2024 was 30k, and in 2023 they had a 300k loss. So not exactly milking!
I think running a care home isn't a great way to make a huge profit.
The kind of facility and services provided are quite expensive.
What I think is more frustrating is that they aren't upfront about the costs; although I think many of the residents wouldn't live there if they were upfront about the costs, even though they can afford it.
Otherwise, it seems like some very basic reform about explaining costs is needed, and some reform to prevent episodes like the lady laying on the floor for 45 minutes.
Retirement villages seem particularly impacted by Baumol's cost disease. Combine that with aging societies and the general neglect often given to elderly people, I'm not optimistic about us being able to provide a reasonable quality of life for our elders in the future...
It's not Baumols cost disease, it's a completely captured audience.
You are getting older and can't take care of yourself. You worked hard your entire life so you have non-zero assets.
Your options are: Sign away everything you have and more to a company in the hope that they will take care of you according to the contract. Or die in your own filth or from tripping and falling in the tub.
Medicare doesn't take care of you until you are destitute, so your only option is to pay whatever a company is asking.
These companies charge $20k a month, but pay their actual laborers peanuts, like we are talking hourly wages that are barely competitive with good construction jobs despite requiring training and spending all day literally wiping down human shit. You will be lucky to have one employee taking care of 30 of you.
All that money is just fed back to shareholders. And building real-estate in the priciest parts of built up cities. Grandma literally can't leave the facility because she's got the dementia and the kids are all in another state so why even build the facility in the middle of a city with skyrocketing housing costs and real-estate prices? Because your clients will pay anything, and that will leave you with a great high value asset that a facility out in a cheaper area would not.
It's just a neat little system for ensuring all those savings and retirement accounts built up by the boomers will not be inherited, and instead will be captured by very very wealthy people.
What possible mechanism could there even be for downward pressure on prices in this system? What are you going to do, NOT need help in your old age?
This is common but I haven't seen it so explicitly stated in the first popup.
You know how you are asked to agree to cookies even though you agreed recently on the same site? It's probably because they added a partner to the 1000 previous ones.
It provides you the option of rejecting all cookies, which is what I did.
Not that I'm defending this, it's all terrible. But how many of us reading this article about to stump up for a paid subscription for Unherd? I'd wager next to none.
It's been tried many times and it always fails. How can you know if the article is worth 50c before seeing it? As you said, it's a random entity you've never heard of before.
Why micropayments will never be a thing in journalism:
I think you could argue that a subscription model is basically trying to make you not think about that. Look at gyms and how they want you to forget to come in a little bit and not evaluate it month by month
Asking up front has the issue that you then have to think about money every time you open an article - a lot of friction
But I think that's the problem: people don't look at subscriptions for news the same way as they look at a gym, for example.
People understand you gotta pay to go to the gym. News, on the other hand, you can get for free (give or take ads and tracking).
The gym question is "am I gonna use this?" The news question is "do I need this?" or "is this sufficiently better than the alternatives to justify the cost?"
Edit: and to touch on the "per-article" aspect, odds are that people might spend let's say ~$2/month with a publisher through article reads, but not $5/month for a subscription.
I wonder how many of the people who say they'd pay 50c would actually pay 50c if they could.
I'd say I read an average of 10 articles per day (with various definitions of "read"). I can't see myself actually spending $5 a day.
At that point I'd be better off getting a few news site subscriptions, but I also highly dislike the idea of committing to a single news source, and committing to a few isn't much of an improvement.
Of course, you could introduce a "tip after you read" mechanism, which I assume would generate probably about 50c per article, and probably motivate various "remember to tip" mechanisms that (I suspect) the same people who say they'd pay/tip would hate with a passion.
You don’t but you have to put a base price on content for it to work. The point of a $0.50 access fee is that all articles individually would cost $0.50. Then you charge a subscription to unlimited access.
No one’s successfully done this because when they do they want to individually price articles and consumers like you for some reason want to attach a per-word-price for each article.
Implement a legitimate system and people will use it. Implement a system with work arounds and people will use the work arounds.
> No one’s successfully done this because when they do they want to individually price articles
But different articles are worth different amounts of money. You can't really escape that fact. If a news org has spent three months doing a deep dive into political corruption and created a blockbuster report on it, in what world can it be justified for that to be the same price as someone recapping last night's episode of Survivor? This is all covered in the article I linked to.
> Implement a legitimate system
By whose definition of legitimate is the question, I guess. I think it's very easy to stand on the outside and say "duh, just do it the right way!".
Then don’t put the more expensive articles as accessible for $0.50. Keep them behind the subscription. Users with subscriptions are the only ones who really want to read longer articles anyways.
If you implement subscriptions + micropayments but let all the web scrapers through that’s not a sound new attempt at a system. That’s the same leaky system with micropayments slapped on top. See?
Ancestor comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45302115 already starts with the context of not wanting to subscribe to a random site, so I don't know how we don't end back up exactly there to have a non-leaky system with micropayments on top?
But the solution to not wanting to subscribe is to pay the $0.50 or leave. Before it was: find a way around paywall or leave. The OP maybe wants free things only?
The reality is that most people just want stuff free.
They say stuff like they whitelist, or donate (it certainly brings lots os social praise) but if you have ever been on the other side, you know that virtually nobody does this.
There's also a very real factor that we now consume from dozens if not hundreds of sources per month.
The overhead, as a consumer, of managing any of this as actual subscriptions, transactions, or membership to some (likely multiple) sort of ecosystem would be substantial, even beyond just the money aspect.
It opens up room for bundling maybe? People want to pay one subscription for everything whenever possible, like Netflix originally vs now. If you could pay 10 a month for a major newspaper + YouTube + some other tech sites that could be pretty attractive. (or whatever combinations - news and sports, porn and tech, IDK)
Maybe. I don't know how fantastic Apple's combined subscriptions are doing. Their news one is already priced higher than that (but I guess you get a lot of news sources).
Yeah, I've noticed too. A surprising amount of the web works fine with most scripts blocked, but if I open an article and it's a blank page, chances are I'm just clicking back.
I didn't even see that, I guess because I have both popups and cookies blocked (with exceptions for cookies on a few websites I actually log in to) so it's not like they could store data even if they wanted to. I don't need to know about their attempts that are going to fail anyway.
> I didn't even see that, I guess because I have both popups and cookies blocked
The notice is likely EU (+ UK) specific for GDPR compliance, if you're elsewhere.
> so it's not like they could store data even if they wanted to. I don't need to know about their attempts that are going to fail anyway
They're also using fingerprinting:
> > "[...] together with other information (e.g. browser type and information, language, screen size, supported technologies etc.) can be stored or read on your device to recognise it [...] Actively scan device characteristics for identification [...] certain characteristics specific to your device might be requested and used to distinguish it from other devices (such as the installed fonts or plugins, the resolution of your screen) [...]"
If you're using something like Tor browser that does its best to hide those characteristics then you may be fine.
i have a hard time feeling sympathetic to some of these stories.
their buy-back prices dont let them reap the windfall from the wild growth of housing prices? or that they're complaining about too many "old people" in a retirement home? they need to pay 5 quid for a beer?
Beware of generalizations, especially for cohorts of millions of people.
Surely, some of these people blocked development and did everything they could to boost their personal net worth at the expense of younger generations. Other people did the reverse. Most people just went with the flow and didn't bother to vote either way.
Ground rent is a bizarre UK property law concept. The resident will have paid for the leasehold of the property (typically a one off payment for 99 years occupancy which is transferable if they want to sell to someone else) but the company retains the freehold and can charge ground rent in return for absolutely nothing (this is different to a service charge which would fund things like communal space/facilities upkeep). This arrangement sort of makes a tiny bit of sense for apartments if you're being generous about it but there was a scandal in the UK that lots of regular houses were being sold leasehold not freehold with ground rent that started at a token level but ramped up significantly above inflation
> “Would you give me a hand, sweetheart?”, she calmly asks, “Don’t touch her!” the bar manager snaps as I bend towards her. “You’re not allowed to touch her!” The woman blinks up at me, confused. “We have to call the care team — otherwise she could sue.”
As a paramedic, this galls me. As much as it galled me that many of these times, the "care team" (mostly LPNs) would call 911, for anything larger than a bandaid, or simple care tasks. Why? "Because of our policy/liability insurance", generally.
The worst part? Often the big sign out front. "Round the clock nursing care!" - and a bill to match.
Under capitialism, why would anyone think that this is anything but expected.
These living communities are meant to house you, until you die, for a price. You have saved up money to pay for that service until you die. Why would they leave money on the table? Why would they spend any extra on someone who's "going to die anyway". Someone who is barely ambulatory; who has few outside connections.
It's the horrible result of end stage capitalism, but it's hardly unexpected.
Customers who are elderly, obviously don't have others watching over them, and are mentally and/or physically degraded? You expect those customers to exercise the choice of the market?
The reality is that once that elderly person has moved to the retirement facility, they're pretty much a locked in customer. The firm (sadly) can pretty much do with them as they please within the extent of the law.
There are exceptions to this rule, and I am sure you are aware that all industries do not have the same ability to change providers, like say telecom.
You are NOT going to be changing houses and care homes very regularly past a certain age.
The animal that you pilot, will simply not have the capability to power through the change, remember every item, keep on top of documents, bills and more. You will not necessarily have friends and family to help you through this.
Going to court is unpleasant, since it will mean you are going to spend the rest of your life fighting. You may count on the fact that some portion of people will be fighters, and willing to sue, but thats statistic is of little comfort if you are the one fighting.
Wringing the elderly for profit would not happen under any other economic system because Capitalism is the only economic system which puts profit as the central motivation.
My understanding is the profit is purely a capitalistic idea. Feel free to prove me wrong.
Not necessarily. Without profit you're relying solely on intrinsic motivation to ensure good care. I won't deny it's a powerful motivator but how many people are passionate about eldercare? You might get fewer care centers overall.
> Not necessarily. Without profit you're relying solely on intrinsic motivation to ensure good care. I won't deny it's a powerful motivator but how many people are passionate about eldercare? You might get fewer care centers overall.
The above is a bunch of non-sequitur nonsense.
The article is about how senior living facilities do everything they can to reduce cost/liabilities and to maximize profit. Did you actually read it or are you just posting contrary comments?
I responded to the article that under capitalism, of course these firms are going to maximize profits. Even when doing something that most of us would consider a humane responsibility like elder care.
You asked me why do I limit profit seeking in this manner to capitalism, seemingly not knowing that profit is a Capitalistic idea. And then you non sequitur into whether elders are taken care of under all economic systems and what motivates that.
THE POINT BEING MADE is that regardless of what the outcome of the situation is, elders being taken care of, elders not being taken care of, houses being painted red vs blue, etc, it is unsurprising that firms are seeking maximize profit. The question to be ask it is why they would not seek profit, under capitalism.
Capitalism is a system. When you burn your food that is not end stage cooking, but a failure to manage cooking as a system. When your worn tires blow out while speeding causing you to fly off the road that is not end stage vehicular mobility, but irresponsible driving.
The last time Capitalism went unchecked and tried to eat itself was the Great Depression. That was ended by controlling Capitalism with strong regulations, high taxes on the rich, and pervasive union membership of workers. And the Social Security system and Medicare were also a part of that deal.
When people talk of "end stage Capitalism" all they are saying is that they lack the will and the power to use the tools we already know work to solve these problems.
The only thing really disturbing thing I read in the piece is this:
> a yell cuts through the noise; an older lady has fallen by the serving hatch and is unable to stand unassisted. “Would you give me a hand, sweetheart?”, she calmly asks, “Don’t touch her!” the bar manager snaps as I bend towards her. “You’re not allowed to touch her!” The woman blinks up at me, confused. “We have to call the care team — otherwise she could sue.” And so, for the next 45 minutes, she lies there
That's nothing to do with profit. Nonprofit and government-run facilities are just as strict about following legally dictated rules to illogical and counterproductive results as for-profit facilities are.
I'm actually impressed that the author found so little to complain about.
On the supposed topic of profiteering, the article is frustratingly light on analysis. It's presented like it's going to be an exposé, but then he gets distracted by his own discovery of the horrors of aging:
> it’s hard to feel sentimental when I recall my own experiences: shepherding confused residents to the toilet; placing cones beside rogue deposits in the restaurant; mopping up suspicious puddles (custard, John Smiths, or other); nudging care teams about overstuffed stoma bags; and politely reminding people of where exactly they live
> It strikes me that no matter the service charge, or the quality of the restaurant — which John chides as “more like a backstreet cafe” — or whether privately owned or council-housed, you may still end up defecating onto your shoe in the middle of a bistro. No amount of ground rent can protect your dignity when there is an intrinsic lack of it in ageing
> “How’s Harry?” I ask. “Dead.” “Helen?” “Dead.” “Lucy?” “In care.” “Pirate Paul?” (he wore an eye-patch and a cap with an anchor on it.) “Dead, I found him.” “Mary One?” “Alive.” “Mary Two?” “Nope.” “Bombay Jan?” “In the bar.” “Little John?” “Had a fall”.
It might have been a better article if he had spared us his personal feelings about aging -- his most interested readers have nothing to learn from him on that topic -- and dedicated those inches to the economics. All he manages to tell us is that people are paying quite a bit, which means nothing in isolation. Are there examples of how it can be done for less?
It also glosses over some details that seem important for analyzing cost and comparing to alternatives, like what level of assistance is provided, though I'm American and this is perhaps not an issue for British readers. (The existence of "care teams" that attend to falls and stoma bags shows that "independent living" means something different in this context than in an American one.)
Speaking as someone with an aging parent who will likely need some kind of daily assistance in the 5-10 years if not sooner, the picture painted by the article doesn't sound like a bad way for my mom to spend her remaining years. I'm not seeing the "sordid reality" the headline promises.
I’m not particularly sympathetic to retirement home narratives that paint each person as a lonely, incompetent senior wasting away. I witnessed first hand how my mother spent her adulthood partying instead of providing and now it’s become a critical issue for our family to provide for her. Ultimately I don’t expect my children (or staff-journalist) to project pity on me for my circumstances.
I run a weekly route with MealsOnWheels and deliver food/perform wellness checks to many people whom are homebound. There are much worse fates for seniors than a community home with social programs and meal service.
I think it is everyone’s duty to buy long-term care insurance (perhaps the government should provide this, as we will all need it). I also believe you must provide for the retirement you expect.
LTC is risky, as others have pointed out.
My company offers one that claims to be reliable (owned by an insurance company that's been around for over 100 years, albeit not in the LTC space).
The one thing I didn't like about them: They don't adjust for inflation. So if you sign up for a $100K plan, you'll get $100K - which will worth a lot less by the time I need it.
Isn’t that adjusting for inflation and not for cost of living?
Fixed - thanks.
> I think it is everyone’s duty to buy long-term care insurance (perhaps the government should provide this, as we will all need it)
this is called Social Security
Demographics and decreased immigration would like a word...
The problem with LTC insurance is it’s likely to go belly up and you are at the end of the day dealing with an insurer whose business model involves denying valid claims. All of that is assuming you can actually get LTC insurance. Good luck if you are over 50. It’s like the private form of social security, a Ponzi that’s approaching its moment of truth.
You’re probably correct (I’m 30 and don’t have a policy) but I can’t think of any financial instrument that would guarantee skilled nursing ($4-8k/month in MCoL) for 10-20 years. No one in the bottom 90% of American earners can afford that drawdown even if they saved considerably.
That’s sorta the point, and the problem. There’s a dependency ratio problem brewing: there are simply not enough working-age people to care for the old people who will need care. No amount of financial instruments can paper over this reality - they will just go bankrupt (eg insurance policies, social security) or steadily drop in value relative to the cost of care (401ks and other financial instruments) until the price of LTC equilibrates to actual capacity. Anyone not in the percentile that actually has eldercare capacity will simply have to go without, much like the price of housing has risen to shut out Millennials that are not in the income percentile needed to get one of the few scarce houses for sale.
No worries, the EU (and UK) governments have gone ahead and taken the only real way out of this conundrum: researching robotic labor to take over for this ... and defunded it.
That’s not the only solution, curing dementia would largely solve the manpower issues here.
Rapid population decline is a separate issue that makes this problem seem much worse. In other words, if elderly care works in a steady state population then it’s a symptom here not a cause.
You have seen the protests in France? Raising the retirement age will not go over well, to put it mildly.
Bloquons tout!
Increasing the retirement age isn’t necessary. It increases overall prosperity in exactly the same way all those things that increase productivity do by allowing you to use extra labor on other problems.
Instead changing demographics means retirement benefits may need to alter their payout formulas, but more prosperity means more money for retirees in absolute terms even if they keep receiving the same percentage of GDP. IE X% of per capita GDP in 2025 is way higher than X% of per capita GDP in 1975 adjusted for inflation easily offsetting increased lifespan. The same is nearly guaranteed in another 50 years.
Most people won't need it for long and so the risks average out to a more reasonable cost. However it is still thousands and people buy cheap not best coverage when they need it so that is what the market provides.
Every insurer's business model involved denying valid claims.
By maximizing the float you can maximize risk-free returns
Retirement is a stupid concept.
One of my Grandfathers just stopped taking medication and going to the docs. And died quite peacefully within a couple years of retiring. Death and decay is just natural and quick. While my other grandfather has been kept alive 30-35 years post retirement popping a tray full of pills everyday, having gone through dozens of surgeries and has had hopeless quality of life post retirement.
The med-industrial complex is a run-away train that is detached for any moral system. It can't even produce any morality anymore. Because its not efficient or rational to do so :)
Perhaps it's the idea that we all must work full time with 10 days of annual leave until we reach the point of needing pills and medical assistance to live comfortably that is the issue.
Are you volunteering yourself and your kids to not taking medication and seeing doctors in your old age? Or are you volunteering "other people"?
Seems like a nasty interpretation to assume a grandfather is other people and make it a straw man argument..
We could just as well ask:
Are you volunteering yourself and your children for 30 years hooked up to tubes with partially effective pain medication?
Are you volunteering yourself and your children for 30 years hooked up to tubes with partially effective pain medication?
No one spends 30 years hooked to tubes. Ask better questions, or at least dial back on the hyperbole if you'd like a reasonable discussion.
I don't think that is accurate.. but my point was the hyperbole of assuming the pathological case.
Your point is very difficult to understand. I answered your question even though I did not understand its relevance.
It sounds like you have not had much off the record contact with members of the medical community. Perhaps a summary of the beliefs of the community I grew up in would help:
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/40494645/
Huh? To answer your question: yes, I absolutely volunteer myself and my kid to be alive as long as possible.
If possible I would volunteer you and your family to stop getting medical care when all of you get old.
Fair?
That depends. Retirement as passage into idleness? Sure. Many people who retire piss away the remainder of their lives because they don't know what to do with themselves. They get depressed, and they become lonely, because they become isolated. Children move away, spouses die, friends move away or die. Couple this with suburban planning where you can't do anything without a car (something the elderly are less likely to be able to operate) and where there is no town center, certainly not one congenial to the social life of the neighborhood or town. With the decline in church membership, you don't have that option anymore, one that also dealt with questions dealing with the end of life (if you view death as the absolute end, then your life was hopeless to begin with; retirement and old age simply strip distractions and illusions effectively).
But this is separate from the question of retirement as such, or the question of aging. Your grandfather, I presume, only refused to take medication and medical treatment, which falls under "extraordinary care", and this is morally licit. Had he refused food or offed himself intentionally (or with "assistance"), that would have been a different matter.
Some of us get old and tired. Retirement is a necessity. Your opinion will change with age on this one I expect. retirement has existed really since humans lived past their 40s. (1700s) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Retirement
> retirement has existed really since humans lived past their 40s
We've always lived past our 40s. We just stopped having a bunch of people die in childhood (or birthing children).
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20181002-how-long-did-anc...
"If one’s thirties were a decrepit old age, ancient writers and politicians don’t seem to have got the message. In the early 7th Century BC, the Greek poet Hesiod wrote that a man should marry “when you are not much less than 30, and not much more”. Meanwhile, ancient Rome’s ‘cursus honorum’ – the sequence of political offices that an ambitious young man would undertake – didn’t even allow a young man to stand for his first office, that of quaestor, until the age of 30 (under Emperor Augustus, this was later lowered to 25; Augustus himself died at 75). To be consul, you had to be 43 – eight years older than the US’s minimum age limit of 35 to hold a presidency."
"As a result, much of what we think we know about ancient Rome’s statistical life expectancy comes from life expectancies in comparable societies. Those tell us that as many as one-third of infants died before the age of one, and half of children before age 10. After that age your chances got significantly better. If you made it to 60, you’d probably live to be 70."
Neanderthal elders probably took on lighter-duty tasks as they aged just like today's elders do.
Humans have always lived past their 40s. You've misunderstand life expectancy statistics, because human age-at-death forms a bimodal distribution: A lot of kids and infants die (especially historically), and then your body starts falling apart in your 50s. So while the average life expectancy at birth for a lot of history might have been in the 30-40 year span, it has never been common for people to die in their 30s. Because once you make it to ~15, your life expectancy is another 30-40 years. And if you make it to 30, your life expectancy was still another 25-30 years.
Pretty sure we’re all being milked for profit. Thats kinda how this whole thing works.
Retirees are more likely than not to have built up at least a small pension or 401(k)[USA]: money sitting there earning interest and capital gains. You don't think the Aging Industry is going to just sit around and not try to grab as much of it as they can? They are going to do their best to ensure the system is set up to let them harvest those accounts dry.
Everyone wants to grab whatever seniors have. I've seen it.
Children and other family squabble over the assets even before they pass. You'll see neighbors talking senile/demented seniors into giving away their stuff, or selling it for a silly low price (like a truck for a dollar, or my one neighbor asking my other neighbor for a free fishing boat). Then there's the scam calls...
The current elder care industry is optimized to ensure neighbors and children will have nothing left to fight over.
Give it not too much longer, and someone somewhere will make it so debts will be inherited, and then we can all be milked even harder.
Yea again, that's not different than anyone else with any other amount of money. For profit corporations are designed from the ground up to separate us from our money (or "milk" if you will).
In reading the article, it doesn't seem to me that anyone is being taken advantage of any more than all of us are when we walk into a shopping mall, open amazon.com, or buy a home.
Indeed, and not when you do work in exchange for 100% profit.
I would wager that’s exactly what the GP thinks.
It was pretty clear to me they think the entire system is set up so that anyone with needs is milked to extract the maximum possible amount of money.
I know someone who started an elder care business with explicitly this purpose. He stopped working in the more conventional medical system because he saw an opportunity. Unsure how it is going at this point, I haven't checked in recently.
Elder care is hard, and expensive. Friends have worked in various levels of it at various times, from food services on up. There is clearly some good for people to be around a community and there are real needs that require constant attention for some. But there is a drive to do more with less which almost always seems to end up with stories of people not being attended to as quickly as you might hope.
Memory care is particularly difficult, on the family and on the businesses. It is just so all consuming and from the outside it can be hard to know if adequate care is being taken. Of course I do know someone who's mom put her dad into memory care, then moved and basically started a new life with a boyfriend while still married so she had access to the money.
My parent's solution is to day they don't want to draw things out. But I think that is easy to say from a position of health and barring any significant diagnosis there is more of a slow slide to infirmity than a clear juncture to make such a choice. We'll see, my family is close and I expect we will provide care in person. But also life is complicated and that is a ways off.
I mean that's just trivially true right? For profit corporations are designed to maximize profits, therefore they must try to maximize the amount of money they extract from their customers.
And now you know the entire reason the US is consumed by political chaos.
A rational society would be regulating those corporations to ensure they act in the public best interest at least some of the time. We're seeing the result of what happens when we are 50 years behind on that. And the current administration is generally rolling back regulations all over.
Think of the money at stake and it will become obvious that our current situation isn't mere happenstance. The chaos is a deliberate smoke screen -- perhaps not exactly planned by the current administration, but orchestrated by the oligarchs behind the scenes.
As opposed to public companies? Come to Northwest Europe and you'll find a very similar problem: elderly in homes, so incredibly understaffed that there simply isn't anyone to pick up someone who falls for hours.
These days every few months there's a new "accident" reported in these places. They have been destaffed to dangerous levels. Apparently last months' issue was that the administration was wrong. A room that had an elderly person was registered as empty, but had an old lady inside. She starved to death because she was unable to leave the room and "didn't call for help" (probably didn't call loud enough).
Those are generally private companies too, at least in Sweden, I would assume most of the nordics.
That last 20-30 years have seen increasing privatization of services paid for with public funds, in everything from infrastructure, healthcare, eldercare and schools. Of course they maximize profits (maximizing residents, students, patients) and minimize costs (staff, care).
It's the same problem, not a different one.
But that is not a property of private industry ... or I should say, it is, but it is not a difference with public industry.
In public industry the name of the game is to maximize subsidy for minimal actual work done. Lots of people, but nothing happens.
If you were alive in the 80s you would have seen this in action. People who "work" ... but not much at all. Many people, but zero activity. I'm told it was much worse in the 60s.
I'm not prescribing a solution nor passing any judgment. Simply making an observation.
It's an incredibly difficult problem with no perfect solution.
prison life
That's the fun part about all of this. Boomers bought their houses for $30k in the 80s and today they're worth $3M. Sounds like they are set up comfortably for retirement and their millennial kids, who are pushing 40 and haven't been able to afford a house yet, are in for a nice inheritance.
Wrong! Because while their house is worth $3M, it will be fully leveraged to pay for the cost of their deathcare. Mom and dad will die broke in a retirement home, and your inheritance will be paying for their funeral out of your own pocket.
Yea, reverse mortgages are yet another underhanded scheme to harvest what remains of the elderly's wealth. Some CEO somewhere said "Well, we've already found a way to drain their health savings, their retirement and pension... what else can we get our hands on?" and poof! The Reverse Mortgage! They're not going to stop until they make debt inheritable, so they can soak the next generation before they even retire.
Oh yeah, and then there's those commercials you see on the channels with a 55+ viewership. They're selling things like this: https://www.ovidlife.com
"Sell Your Life Insurance Policy. Turn your life insurance policy into an immediate cash payout" next to a picture of seniors vacationing on a yacht. Then they bring out Tom Selleck who looks in the camera and says "Would I lie to you? You can trust me!"
Parents gotta transfer all their money to the kids, and then apply for government assistant because on paper, the parents have no money.
Look up Filial responsibility laws[1]. They're always looking for legal ways to sponge up that wealth.
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Filial_responsibility_laws
How does that work? If the parents live in a filial state but the children don't?
Often by weaponizing elderly narcissism and exploiting cognitive decline in a quasi-legal fashion.
Maybe that's bad?
Possibly, but it's been the human condition ever since currency was invented.
I think that saying this is a convenient cover up of the shortcomings of our own culture. I really don't think that in all of human history, there's been no culture having a more healthy relationship with their elderly. I'd even wager that it's pretty easy to find counter-examples.
Nihilistic sarcasm makes you sound cool and knowledgeable! /s
I read the article and didn't actually see any evidence that this is not a reasonably fair and functional system. I did read:
* People complaining that the cafe wasn't as good as they liked.
* The fact that old people have signed up for a retirement village.
* The fact that some of them get confused and need help.
What's the evidence base here?
Exactly. I just tried fact checking the "milking" bit. Looking up lists of care home groups, Allegra Care came up first. Looking at their financial statements (all public, and include full details of profit and loss, thanks to UK company law), their profit in 2024 was 30k, and in 2023 they had a 300k loss. So not exactly milking!
I think running a care home isn't a great way to make a huge profit.
If your company shows profit in official reports you must fire your CFO.
The kind of facility and services provided are quite expensive.
What I think is more frustrating is that they aren't upfront about the costs; although I think many of the residents wouldn't live there if they were upfront about the costs, even though they can afford it.
Otherwise, it seems like some very basic reform about explaining costs is needed, and some reform to prevent episodes like the lady laying on the floor for 45 minutes.
Maybe the buy-back scheme?
> when he dies, the company will buy back his share from his next of kin for less than he originally paid.
Retirement villages seem particularly impacted by Baumol's cost disease. Combine that with aging societies and the general neglect often given to elderly people, I'm not optimistic about us being able to provide a reasonable quality of life for our elders in the future...
Anything that has less productivity increase than the most productive sector of the economy is subject to cost disease to some degree
It's not Baumols cost disease, it's a completely captured audience.
You are getting older and can't take care of yourself. You worked hard your entire life so you have non-zero assets.
Your options are: Sign away everything you have and more to a company in the hope that they will take care of you according to the contract. Or die in your own filth or from tripping and falling in the tub.
Medicare doesn't take care of you until you are destitute, so your only option is to pay whatever a company is asking.
These companies charge $20k a month, but pay their actual laborers peanuts, like we are talking hourly wages that are barely competitive with good construction jobs despite requiring training and spending all day literally wiping down human shit. You will be lucky to have one employee taking care of 30 of you.
All that money is just fed back to shareholders. And building real-estate in the priciest parts of built up cities. Grandma literally can't leave the facility because she's got the dementia and the kids are all in another state so why even build the facility in the middle of a city with skyrocketing housing costs and real-estate prices? Because your clients will pay anything, and that will leave you with a great high value asset that a facility out in a cheaper area would not.
It's just a neat little system for ensuring all those savings and retirement accounts built up by the boomers will not be inherited, and instead will be captured by very very wealthy people.
What possible mechanism could there even be for downward pressure on prices in this system? What are you going to do, NOT need help in your old age?
I stopped when this modal popped up:
UnHerd and our 877 technology partners ask you to consent to the use of cookies to store/access and process personal data on your device.
This is common but I haven't seen it so explicitly stated in the first popup.
You know how you are asked to agree to cookies even though you agreed recently on the same site? It's probably because they added a partner to the 1000 previous ones.
I've seen that wording a few times now in different places. I wonder who's aggregating all these smaller ad firms/data brokers.
It provides you the option of rejecting all cookies, which is what I did.
Not that I'm defending this, it's all terrible. But how many of us reading this article about to stump up for a paid subscription for Unherd? I'd wager next to none.
Subscription to a random entity I've never heard of before, for one article? Hell no.
50 cents flat to read the whole article, without being harassed by aggressive ads or tracked by 900 different companies? I'd be more than willing.
It's been tried many times and it always fails. How can you know if the article is worth 50c before seeing it? As you said, it's a random entity you've never heard of before.
Why micropayments will never be a thing in journalism:
https://www.cjr.org/opinion/micropayments-subscription-pay-b...
I do agree with the spirit of your point, but there's an easy counterargument:
How do you know that the next month worth of articles from the publisher you are subscribed to is worth the fee before seeing it?
There is a such a thing as building trust in a brand, this is not a barrier to micropayments.
I think you could argue that a subscription model is basically trying to make you not think about that. Look at gyms and how they want you to forget to come in a little bit and not evaluate it month by month
Asking up front has the issue that you then have to think about money every time you open an article - a lot of friction
But I think that's the problem: people don't look at subscriptions for news the same way as they look at a gym, for example.
People understand you gotta pay to go to the gym. News, on the other hand, you can get for free (give or take ads and tracking).
The gym question is "am I gonna use this?" The news question is "do I need this?" or "is this sufficiently better than the alternatives to justify the cost?"
Edit: and to touch on the "per-article" aspect, odds are that people might spend let's say ~$2/month with a publisher through article reads, but not $5/month for a subscription.
I wonder how many of the people who say they'd pay 50c would actually pay 50c if they could.
I'd say I read an average of 10 articles per day (with various definitions of "read"). I can't see myself actually spending $5 a day.
At that point I'd be better off getting a few news site subscriptions, but I also highly dislike the idea of committing to a single news source, and committing to a few isn't much of an improvement.
Of course, you could introduce a "tip after you read" mechanism, which I assume would generate probably about 50c per article, and probably motivate various "remember to tip" mechanisms that (I suspect) the same people who say they'd pay/tip would hate with a passion.
You don’t but you have to put a base price on content for it to work. The point of a $0.50 access fee is that all articles individually would cost $0.50. Then you charge a subscription to unlimited access.
No one’s successfully done this because when they do they want to individually price articles and consumers like you for some reason want to attach a per-word-price for each article.
Implement a legitimate system and people will use it. Implement a system with work arounds and people will use the work arounds.
> No one’s successfully done this because when they do they want to individually price articles
But different articles are worth different amounts of money. You can't really escape that fact. If a news org has spent three months doing a deep dive into political corruption and created a blockbuster report on it, in what world can it be justified for that to be the same price as someone recapping last night's episode of Survivor? This is all covered in the article I linked to.
> Implement a legitimate system
By whose definition of legitimate is the question, I guess. I think it's very easy to stand on the outside and say "duh, just do it the right way!".
It's not like things haven't been tried.
- Blendle: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blendle
- Scroll: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scroll_(web_service)
- Google Contributor: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Contributor
- Axate: https://www.axate.com
- Coil (to an extent): https://coil.com/
All these people tried to solve this problem and weren't able to.
Then don’t put the more expensive articles as accessible for $0.50. Keep them behind the subscription. Users with subscriptions are the only ones who really want to read longer articles anyways.
> Implement a legitimate system and people will use it.
This sounds like no true Scotsman.
I guess it's tautological that nobody's tried the right model because nobody's been successful.
If you implement subscriptions + micropayments but let all the web scrapers through that’s not a sound new attempt at a system. That’s the same leaky system with micropayments slapped on top. See?
I guess.
Ancestor comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45302115 already starts with the context of not wanting to subscribe to a random site, so I don't know how we don't end back up exactly there to have a non-leaky system with micropayments on top?
But the solution to not wanting to subscribe is to pay the $0.50 or leave. Before it was: find a way around paywall or leave. The OP maybe wants free things only?
When it comes to digital stuff, everything wants free things only.
10 years ago a couple of sites I occasionally viewed used "agate", which is now called Axate.
https://www.axate.com/
It worked well, I loaded it with about $3 and used it a few times.
Clearly not something publishers are fans of though as it's far easier to carefully select 987 partners to sell your data to.
The reality is that most people just want stuff free.
They say stuff like they whitelist, or donate (it certainly brings lots os social praise) but if you have ever been on the other side, you know that virtually nobody does this.
There's also a very real factor that we now consume from dozens if not hundreds of sources per month.
The overhead, as a consumer, of managing any of this as actual subscriptions, transactions, or membership to some (likely multiple) sort of ecosystem would be substantial, even beyond just the money aspect.
It opens up room for bundling maybe? People want to pay one subscription for everything whenever possible, like Netflix originally vs now. If you could pay 10 a month for a major newspaper + YouTube + some other tech sites that could be pretty attractive. (or whatever combinations - news and sports, porn and tech, IDK)
Maybe. I don't know how fantastic Apple's combined subscriptions are doing. Their news one is already priced higher than that (but I guess you get a lot of news sources).
I had hoped that Brave's BAT would get some kind of traction for similar use cases but it seems to be quickly going nowhere.
I just toggle the JavaScript off...
I tried this but I found a lot of vile websites these days load the actual article with JS
Yeah, I've noticed too. A surprising amount of the web works fine with most scripts blocked, but if I open an article and it's a blank page, chances are I'm just clicking back.
That precludes them from indexing the article in search engines, so thankfully it’s not as popular as it otherwise would be
I have a chrome extension that allows me to toggle on/off as needed. I'm not advocating leaving it off, that breaks a lot of sites.
I didn't even see that, I guess because I have both popups and cookies blocked (with exceptions for cookies on a few websites I actually log in to) so it's not like they could store data even if they wanted to. I don't need to know about their attempts that are going to fail anyway.
> I didn't even see that, I guess because I have both popups and cookies blocked
The notice is likely EU (+ UK) specific for GDPR compliance, if you're elsewhere.
> so it's not like they could store data even if they wanted to. I don't need to know about their attempts that are going to fail anyway
They're also using fingerprinting:
> > "[...] together with other information (e.g. browser type and information, language, screen size, supported technologies etc.) can be stored or read on your device to recognise it [...] Actively scan device characteristics for identification [...] certain characteristics specific to your device might be requested and used to distinguish it from other devices (such as the installed fonts or plugins, the resolution of your screen) [...]"
If you're using something like Tor browser that does its best to hide those characteristics then you may be fine.
i have a hard time feeling sympathetic to some of these stories.
their buy-back prices dont let them reap the windfall from the wild growth of housing prices? or that they're complaining about too many "old people" in a retirement home? they need to pay 5 quid for a beer?
Beware of generalizations, especially for cohorts of millions of people.
Surely, some of these people blocked development and did everything they could to boost their personal net worth at the expense of younger generations. Other people did the reverse. Most people just went with the flow and didn't bother to vote either way.
Better call Saul!
Gimme Jimmy! He's the elder law specialist. Saul is the shady criminal lawyer.
Wrong country! (Joke)
Guess what happens to industries that are not profitable.
Sloppy editing?
Residents face service charges averaging £524 a month, on top of ground rents that can exceed £500 a year.
£500 a year would be implausibly low. I suspect a few missing nils or a thousands indicator.
Ground rent is a bizarre UK property law concept. The resident will have paid for the leasehold of the property (typically a one off payment for 99 years occupancy which is transferable if they want to sell to someone else) but the company retains the freehold and can charge ground rent in return for absolutely nothing (this is different to a service charge which would fund things like communal space/facilities upkeep). This arrangement sort of makes a tiny bit of sense for apartments if you're being generous about it but there was a scandal in the UK that lots of regular houses were being sold leasehold not freehold with ground rent that started at a token level but ramped up significantly above inflation
Thanks!
https://archive.today/YcLmj
https://web.archive.org/web/20250919141335/https://unherd.co...
> “Would you give me a hand, sweetheart?”, she calmly asks, “Don’t touch her!” the bar manager snaps as I bend towards her. “You’re not allowed to touch her!” The woman blinks up at me, confused. “We have to call the care team — otherwise she could sue.”
As a paramedic, this galls me. As much as it galled me that many of these times, the "care team" (mostly LPNs) would call 911, for anything larger than a bandaid, or simple care tasks. Why? "Because of our policy/liability insurance", generally.
The worst part? Often the big sign out front. "Round the clock nursing care!" - and a bill to match.
https://archive.ph/YcLmj
Is that surprising?
I gather this is about retirement villages in the UK; are retirement villages new there?
They aren't new - but they tend to be called things like "integrated retirement communities" or similar.
How unbounded greed destroys another great idea, chapter 2341131
Under capitialism, why would anyone think that this is anything but expected.
These living communities are meant to house you, until you die, for a price. You have saved up money to pay for that service until you die. Why would they leave money on the table? Why would they spend any extra on someone who's "going to die anyway". Someone who is barely ambulatory; who has few outside connections.
It's the horrible result of end stage capitalism, but it's hardly unexpected.
> Why would they leave money on the table?
Because if they don't, the customer will go to the competition who does.
Customers who are elderly, obviously don't have others watching over them, and are mentally and/or physically degraded? You expect those customers to exercise the choice of the market?
The reality is that once that elderly person has moved to the retirement facility, they're pretty much a locked in customer. The firm (sadly) can pretty much do with them as they please within the extent of the law.
Ah, the "Perfect Competition" fallacy!
Ever heard of a confusopoly[1]?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confusopoly
There are exceptions to this rule, and I am sure you are aware that all industries do not have the same ability to change providers, like say telecom.
You are NOT going to be changing houses and care homes very regularly past a certain age.
The animal that you pilot, will simply not have the capability to power through the change, remember every item, keep on top of documents, bills and more. You will not necessarily have friends and family to help you through this.
Going to court is unpleasant, since it will mean you are going to spend the rest of your life fighting. You may count on the fact that some portion of people will be fighters, and willing to sue, but thats statistic is of little comfort if you are the one fighting.
Is there a reason to believe this wouldn't happen under other economic systems?
Yes there is.
Wringing the elderly for profit would not happen under any other economic system because Capitalism is the only economic system which puts profit as the central motivation.
My understanding is the profit is purely a capitalistic idea. Feel free to prove me wrong.
Does that mean the elderly would be better cared for?
That is orthogonal to the point being made.
Not necessarily. Without profit you're relying solely on intrinsic motivation to ensure good care. I won't deny it's a powerful motivator but how many people are passionate about eldercare? You might get fewer care centers overall.
> Not necessarily. Without profit you're relying solely on intrinsic motivation to ensure good care. I won't deny it's a powerful motivator but how many people are passionate about eldercare? You might get fewer care centers overall.
The above is a bunch of non-sequitur nonsense.
The article is about how senior living facilities do everything they can to reduce cost/liabilities and to maximize profit. Did you actually read it or are you just posting contrary comments?
I responded to the article that under capitalism, of course these firms are going to maximize profits. Even when doing something that most of us would consider a humane responsibility like elder care.
You asked me why do I limit profit seeking in this manner to capitalism, seemingly not knowing that profit is a Capitalistic idea. And then you non sequitur into whether elders are taken care of under all economic systems and what motivates that.
THE POINT BEING MADE is that regardless of what the outcome of the situation is, elders being taken care of, elders not being taken care of, houses being painted red vs blue, etc, it is unsurprising that firms are seeking maximize profit. The question to be ask it is why they would not seek profit, under capitalism.
Capitalism is a system. When you burn your food that is not end stage cooking, but a failure to manage cooking as a system. When your worn tires blow out while speeding causing you to fly off the road that is not end stage vehicular mobility, but irresponsible driving.
The last time Capitalism went unchecked and tried to eat itself was the Great Depression. That was ended by controlling Capitalism with strong regulations, high taxes on the rich, and pervasive union membership of workers. And the Social Security system and Medicare were also a part of that deal.
When people talk of "end stage Capitalism" all they are saying is that they lack the will and the power to use the tools we already know work to solve these problems.
Perhaps they're saying that the system inevitably evolves into a subset of the state space regardless of controls.
The only thing really disturbing thing I read in the piece is this:
> a yell cuts through the noise; an older lady has fallen by the serving hatch and is unable to stand unassisted. “Would you give me a hand, sweetheart?”, she calmly asks, “Don’t touch her!” the bar manager snaps as I bend towards her. “You’re not allowed to touch her!” The woman blinks up at me, confused. “We have to call the care team — otherwise she could sue.” And so, for the next 45 minutes, she lies there
That's nothing to do with profit. Nonprofit and government-run facilities are just as strict about following legally dictated rules to illogical and counterproductive results as for-profit facilities are.
I'm actually impressed that the author found so little to complain about.
On the supposed topic of profiteering, the article is frustratingly light on analysis. It's presented like it's going to be an exposé, but then he gets distracted by his own discovery of the horrors of aging:
> it’s hard to feel sentimental when I recall my own experiences: shepherding confused residents to the toilet; placing cones beside rogue deposits in the restaurant; mopping up suspicious puddles (custard, John Smiths, or other); nudging care teams about overstuffed stoma bags; and politely reminding people of where exactly they live
> It strikes me that no matter the service charge, or the quality of the restaurant — which John chides as “more like a backstreet cafe” — or whether privately owned or council-housed, you may still end up defecating onto your shoe in the middle of a bistro. No amount of ground rent can protect your dignity when there is an intrinsic lack of it in ageing
> “How’s Harry?” I ask. “Dead.” “Helen?” “Dead.” “Lucy?” “In care.” “Pirate Paul?” (he wore an eye-patch and a cap with an anchor on it.) “Dead, I found him.” “Mary One?” “Alive.” “Mary Two?” “Nope.” “Bombay Jan?” “In the bar.” “Little John?” “Had a fall”.
It might have been a better article if he had spared us his personal feelings about aging -- his most interested readers have nothing to learn from him on that topic -- and dedicated those inches to the economics. All he manages to tell us is that people are paying quite a bit, which means nothing in isolation. Are there examples of how it can be done for less?
It also glosses over some details that seem important for analyzing cost and comparing to alternatives, like what level of assistance is provided, though I'm American and this is perhaps not an issue for British readers. (The existence of "care teams" that attend to falls and stoma bags shows that "independent living" means something different in this context than in an American one.)
Speaking as someone with an aging parent who will likely need some kind of daily assistance in the 5-10 years if not sooner, the picture painted by the article doesn't sound like a bad way for my mom to spend her remaining years. I'm not seeing the "sordid reality" the headline promises.
If we could milk unemployed people for profits we would have unemployment villages too I bet.
No job? No life? Stay here eating, sleeping and fucking around until some opportunity comes up.
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