The solution is this: every sector of the economy has been optimized to extract as much money from everyone as possible. This is the implicit role of government--to help the rich get richer. Have an idea that makes money? The government will help you make it happen. Does it materially harm the public, like sports gambling? Then you better make a lot of money to pay off the politicos!

This through-and-through corruption means that we now graduate in lifelong debt, working jobs that don't cover the rent of places we can never own and spend money on health insurance we can never use because we can't afford the co-pays. We are forced to finance expensive car because that's the only way to get to work because the bus routes have all been purchased by car companies and liquidated long ago while regulations keep out cheaper foreign cars for "safety" while massive trucks and SUVs are killing pedestrians and cyclists at record rates. Forced to work longer hours and with less money in our pockets, our third spaces disappear. Now stuck at home, we are forced to buy electronics now at inflated prices because of the AI bubble and use oligopoly internet that should have long ago been regulated as a utility but for the massive campaign contributions those companies make to politicians to have a shadow of a social connection with each other.

We are no longer citizens. We are livestock.

This is unsustainable.

Thats the billionaires squeezing profits out of every transaction, not just the enrollment fees, the rent on the property, the Healthcare and insurance premiums for the staff and the operation.

Everything they do is being optimized to squeeze wealth Into the mouths of billionaires.

Tax wealth not work.

I skimmed the comments and didn't catch this, but don't forget about all the PRIVATE EQUITIES buying up nursing home facilities, banking on SSI, Medicare and Medicaid funding, upcharging perscriptions, "maximizing efficiencies" (aka paying as little wages as possible), and the revolving door of customers...

The USA is just 3 Corporations in a trench coat. And corporations are just pyramid schemes.

People will lose their minds if you suggest giving someone medical care for free, but they keep ignoring all the landlords and CEOs and private equity groups and all the middlemen extracting the vast majority of all the wealth out, while also contributing the absolute least.

The fact that we have a system where one person works every waking minute of their life and still can't afford basic food and housing and another person sits around all day on their 3rd yacht sipping one of a kind wines and rakes in billions is insanity.

We were paying double daycare until recently. While it was never inexpensive, it was more manageable when our daycare center was locally owned. Then Kindercare came in and bought 80% of daycares in my major city. When we tried changing daycares we found that many daycares not explicitly named Kindercare were still under the Kindercare umbrella but retained their old name. I guess they caught on.

As SOON as the corporate takeover was complete they started increasing rates 8% per year BEFORE we had high inflation, instituted mandatory annual fees just to enroll, and mandatory fees for supplies that we use to be able to bring but now they charged us MORE than the supplies cost and they were super shitty quality items. So if you wanted to bring in supplies for your kid, you still got to pay the fee for supplies but then also had to buy the non shitty quality ones and bring them in.

To the point of the topic though, what pissed me off the most was that even though we paid 3k/month for two our center started bleeding employees because they simply wouldn't pay them anything. So what this meant is veteran teachers left for more pay and new ones were only there long enough to get experience.

I think a lot more people would be willing to swallow the cost of a nursing home, if the loved one was guaranteed proper care and respect.

And let me tell you, I've worked in a lot of nursing homes (not in a medical position), and it doesnt matter how high end the nursing home is, the treatment is the same across the board.

There are ways you can try to tip the system in your favor to increase the chances of getting better care for your loved one.

1. Visit Frequently. Every Day is best (but if you had that kind of free time you'd probably have your loved one at home instead of a facility). Residents who get frequent, regular visits tend to get better taken care of.

2. Try not to have a visitation pattern, To avoid staff taking care of your loved one in preparation for that day. If you do have a schedule to visit every saturday, then atleast a few times a month try to pop in on different day at random (and don't make it a pattern)

3. If your loved one can not advocate for themselves, put a granny cam in the room. You can decide if you want an overt one or a hidden one. Preferably one you can log into from home/where ever and monitor live, though this may require some kind of subscription.

3a) If your loved one can advocate for themselves, make sure they feel safe and secure to tell you any mistreatment/bad things/unacceptable response times they may be suffering. You'd be surprised how hard it can be to get an at risk relative to confess any mistreatment to you.

4. Be respectful to the staff until they prove otherwise. Sometimes sucking up, and little gifts, and just generally getting to know the staff involved in your loved one will get your loved one better treatment.

5. Do not hesitate to take issues up with the building administrator. The administrator is the highest authority in the building, and doubly do not hesitate to escalate things to your state oversight agency if the administrator fails to satisfy the issue.

4&5 TLDR) Be sweet and kind to staff, but don't hesitate to be a roaring asshole when needed.

and I want to be clear, none of this will guarantee good/better treatment for your loved one. It just increases the chances of good/better treatment. Some people are just too lazy, cruel, and lack a single ounce of give-a-fuck to care. and some facilities try to cut costs by hiring only people that have all but been blackballed from other facilities, at low wages, because the choice for worker is either continue to use the education and experience they have or start over at even lower wage in a whole new job they know nothing about, which means they are typically at the end of their give-a-fuck. But sometimes you can have a facility run by absolute goddamn angels.. and its too random to be able to predict.

Edit

Oh, and one last thing..if you do have something you need to elevate to regulatory boards, make sure you get photo/video evidence if you can. and I mean of bed sores, unattended diapers, personal diary logs of wait times when the clal nurse button is hit, etc etc etc. Evidence is key.

I think someone wrote a manifesto about this once.

This makes me think of an issue we had around here recently. We have a public company running the majority of school buses in our area. They receive funding from the government that should be enough to pay their drivers around 24$ an hour. Yet, they've been paying them 18$ or less for years.

This year the drivers tried to negotiate for a higher wage and the owners weren't even willing to go over 19$... So they went on strike and buses stopped; parents had to make alternative arrangements. This went on for weeks, the employer just kept playing hard ball and not budging.

Surprisingly, parents were overwhelmingly on the driver's side which I was happy to see. It reached a point where the owners almost had their contract taken away. After about 2 months, they finally gave in and agreed to an increase to about 21$.

What kills me is that in another town nearby with a different company running the buses, divers are being paid 23-24$ an hour like they're supposed to. So the employer still came out ahead after everything was said and done. Apparently, the owners are from Toronto (about 3-4 hours away from us) and are just using this company to make money which explains their unwillingness to increase their workers pay.

Unrelated rant: Typical big city rich assholes fucking over people in smaller communities. It happened during covid with housing, they came over and scooped up every house they could just to rent them out for profit. I was paying 1000$ for a 3 bedroom apartment and some asshole from Toronto came over and bought it. Then when I moved out, they increased the rent to fucking 2500$....

Labor $200 Land $150 Materials $800 CEO pay and profits $1,000,000,000 Utility $150 someone who is good at the economy please help me budget this. my family is dying

It's rent, and advertising. Shit costs so much and yet the landlord's and advertising industry makes ya think it's the cost of labour. I know alot of restaurant owners who work 5 days a week(alot close two days a week) and only vacation once a year just to visit family. they have steady business but still struggle due to costs. Only places I know are doing well are ones who own their building.

Services are expensive. Where I'm from daycare is socialized but still considered expensive. I imagine a full price in for profit daycare must be brutal.

It adds up...

It adding up is the problem.

Because it means "job creators" who do nothing but posses titles to land and company stocks are syphoning off money.

If they need 3 staff for 21 kids, they're going to pay as little as they can to keep 3 staff. And charge as much as they can to keep 21 kids.

There's no correlation between what staffing costs and what prices are charged, why would there be?

Both are just line items, and the person in charge just wants the profit line to have the biggest number.

The larger the company is, the worst that becomes. Or if the company is small, but owned by someone with a dozen other companies.

Expecting salary to match what people pay is toddler logic, sure it would be great if it worked like that, but any adult thinking more than 2 seconds can see why that's not related in the modern age. Hell, its been decades since the "if we pay workers a living wage a value meal goes up $0.02!".

Americans literally all said they were fine with that, almost zero companies increased pay, and all of them.increaswd prices anyways

There's obviously no correlation

Sadly this math adds up. In my country those are public services. So no corporate greed is involved and no significat ammount goes to corruption or overpaid management.

Sadly this formula for example in daycare is true:

("Huge payment from us" x "number of kids") / " number of people getting paid" = "low number"

We usually just do not account for cooks, cleaners, janitors, administration in our intuition.

First, there is corporate gouging. Anyone owning stocks wants to see a return, not a moderate one but a big one, on their investment. Second, it isn't a straight one to one employee to patient ratio. 24 hour care is 8760 hours per year and full time work is 2000 (with 2 weeks paid vacation) meaning 4.38 employee years for 24hrs, 365 days. It isn't quite that much because staffing is never 1:1. If it were 1:1, at $20 per hour paid to the caregiver, with vacation, sick days, health care, CPP, EI, WCB, it is a minimum of $58,000 per employee. That alone would work out to $4800 per month without housing, food, cleaning, equipment. It isn't cheap to house people who cannot live independently. We need a different model for care to keep the costs lower while providing care that is necessary. This used to all be "free" in-home by older women (Boomer, Silent Gen, Greatest Gen) and still often is, if they cannot access care for family members. Much like child care, that again women used to do for 'free", it costs real money to have someone else cover that work.

You see, honey, when a billion dollars and a billionaire love each other very much ...

This is tangential, but I recently learned quite a bit about hospice care in Oregon. I was dating someone who worked in the industry. She said that private equity was buying up the industry, intending to bill Medicare for as much as possible. I asked why she and her hard-working co-workers didn't start up their own hospice. Don't quote me on the specifics, but 1) a new hospice here has to generate no profit for the first X years and 2) you have to have something like half a million in reserves in order to be allowed the license to start one.

The laws were well-intentioned, but they end up being a way for the wealthy to continue generating income on the backs of everyone else. If you have the industry knowledge and funding to start a hospice, you can do it, then sell it off to private equity after a few years. Rinse and repeat. The rich get richer and we all pay for it, largely via Medicare.

Same with universities and overworked, underpaid professors without tenure, doctors getting minimum wage out of medical school. Really any industry parasitized by Wall Street.

Long-term direct care for humans at any stage of life in the US (that aren't of extreme wealth) is both obscenely expensive and yet woefully inadequate. I work in brain and spinal rehab AFCs and we're far worse than most average nursing homes.

owners of these establishments are removing money from your pocket to there’s and their shareholders. Us common folk always get the shaft

You forgot to add the billionaire shareholders variable to the equation

Middleman economy.

Tangentially related a bit, but I feel like this is part of why the "no one wants to work" became a meme after COVID.

Because everything shutdown, some of these people realized just how much they were paying for day care and getting lunch and gas, and how little they made formit, that they realized they were better off just, not working that secondary income job and didn't go back.

The math definitely adds up.

Shit Policies + Shit Wages = Shit Country