I think someone wrote a manifesto about this once.
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.
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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.
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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)
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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 you’re 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.
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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.
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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.
Why pay $80,000 per year in an expensive country for mediocre care when I could spend $10,000 for my parents in our cheaper home country for exceptional care. There’s like almost 200 countries in the world and life can be very very nice in honestly most of them with a bit of money.
because not everyone can fucking afford to uproot their entire lives to move their entire family to another country at the drop of a hat, on the hope and prayer that they can get any residency/citizenship papers fast tracked and not take a year+ of waiting on it, which will most assuredly be denied since normal people wont be rich enough to fund it and show they wont be a burden to the state.
Jesus fucking christ, the absofuckinglute stupid entitlement of this comment.
So fucking tired of rich fuckwits and know nothing fucking idiots chiming in with the same tired trope of “Oh well, dont like muricuh? then move to another country! heuh heuh heuh” as if its such an easy, affordable fucking thing to do. Trust me, I wager a LOT of people would like to get out of this fucking cesspit if they could.
Can you just go there? Don’t you need a visa?
Hi, I would like to immigrate so I can take advantage of your free health care now that I am the most expensive patient to care for. Also, I cannot work or contribute to the economy. Is there a hospice visa?
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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’ve said for years that daycares and nursing homes are extremely expensive, and they’re probably not charging enough. The profit margins for both of these businesses are extremely thin.
I think posts like this are narrow-minded because they don’t take into consideration the cost of operating these kinds of facilities.
Fundamentally, the reason daycares and nursing homes are so expensive is because the overhead is insane, much like in the American healthcare industry. A portable X-ray machine at a hospital can cost over $100,000, and even the metal slab they slide under you can cost around $10,000.
These machines don’t cost nearly that much to produce. The manufacturers are milking the system.
My gas company charges a minimum monthly fee. I’ve never paid less than $70, no matter how little gas I use.
If you want to make these kinds of services cheaper, especially in America, you have to start with the fundamentals and bring down the cost of the things these businesses are forced to buy and pay for.
A daycare around here is literally a full wage, you can’t tell me that’s not enough. Ever.
I actually can.
The daycare my kid goes to is considered a cheap one. It’s $1,000 a month for my son because he’s three, and it’s even less for older children.
They have about 15 kids enrolled, including two or three babies they care for.
I’m guessing they bring in around $15,000 a month in revenue. They have four employees. Three of them are probably making around $20 an hour, and one manager is likely making a little more than that. Four employees working 40 hours a week is already consuming most of the revenue they bring in each month.
Maybe I’m missing a lot of variables here, but when you add in rent, utilities, insurance, food, supplies, licensing, maintenance, and everything else it takes to keep the business running, it doesn’t seem like there’s much left. Aside from payroll, they’re probably making very little, maybe only a couple thousand dollars a month in profit.
Businesses like daycares and nursing homes, anything that provides quasi-medical care, generally make very little profit. They’re there to fill an essential need, not necessarily to generate massive profits like you see with many internet businesses.
I’d even argue that if you doubled tuition to $2,000 a month, it wouldn’t dramatically increase how much money they actually make. Higher wages, insurance, regulatory compliance, facilities, food, equipment, and other operating costs would still consume a significant portion of that additional revenue.
They take care of kids man… It’s a hard job and they’re already getting paid bullshit for it.
Like I said in my original comment, if you want to change this, we need to change it from the fundamentals, not the business model itself.
Kids are put there out of necessity for a second wage and then that entire second wage gets gobbled up, see the irony there. It’s not working.
What? Nothing you said was ironic… Or made any sense.
I’ll explain it slowly, parents need a second wage to pay the bills as a result of this their kid gets put in daycare which they rather didn’t.
But then that daycare eats up that entire wage, leaving the parents in the same spot financially but now without time or energy.
If you’re trying to say that parents need a second job or supplemental income to pay for daycare you might be correct. Maybe, probably. I don’t know. But that has nothing to do with what I was saying.
No they need a second wage to pay the bills.
As a result of that the need for daycare arises, then that daycare gobbled up that ENTIRE wage in my country.
It does not work. It costs too much. No matter how much you justify the cost from the business point of view.
It’s almost like capital aggregates over time, slowly absorbing or driving out competition, and eventually crystallizing into a single monopolized sector.
If only we had, like, tomes of philosophy predicting this over the last century, and maybe just a smidge of foresight, we could have stopped it before it became a problem. I propose that once a company monopolizes like this and makes itself a threat to the general public, we just absorb it into another branch of government services. This has happened before, usually under wartime laws, but rules and precedent don’t seem to matter nowadays…
The world could be fixed overnight with the right cooperation and motivation.
Well, no, it can’t.
But I don’t disagree with you. We let things get totally out of control.
What we need is sweeping legislation, and it needs to start with the legislators themselves: term limits, harsher penalties for abuse of power, and reforms to executive authority, especially the use of executive orders.
Lobbying should be outlawed entirely. It should be illegal for elected officials to trade, own, or even discuss individual stocks.
There also need to be much stricter limits on what corporations can do and how much market power they can accumulate.
Did you know the U.S. has some of the weakest antitrust enforcement among developed countries? You know why? Lobbying by corporations that want to become monopolies. It’s complete insanity.
And the worst part is they’ve figured out ways to limit the American people’s ability to speak out against it. Most major media is owned by large corporations. People are drowning in debt and diabetes. Sports are on around the clock across multiple channels. We’re distracted. We’re unhealthy, and we’re uneducated.
To add insult to injury, a small minority of people have somehow been convinced that their race is more important than others’ in a country made up of people from every race and background.
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.
I’m making ~10-15% off stocks while putting 1hr of slow chilly work a month into it. Guess someone had to actually earn that for me.
And no, while I highly profit off this rotten system does not mean I love it. I do not, and would gladly trade my wealth for a normal society, in which everyone is equally happy and content. But noone wants my input on dismantling the system and start anew.
I want your input.
Share your ideas.
I have some as well.
See, its that easy.
Awesome! And what does that bring? Ideas i have enough. And now? what to do with it? See? It’s not that easy.
Someone asks for your input like you wanted and you shit on them.
Keep buying stocks and bury your head in your wealth.
Nothing against you as a person, but how exactly would telling you any idea possibly change the world? Are you elon musk? Then it might help. But he also would be the last person on earth who would want a change.
I could give you the ultimate idea that would solve everything, and it would be pointless. I have had many long debates about this for the last 4 decades, and I just got tired. It’s even more fruitful to discuss god with a religious nutjob.
And why should I not use stocks? To be poor and matter not? I’m also not rich enough to matter, but it still beats the prior.
Yawn
You forgot to add the billionaire shareholders variable to the equation
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.
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.
Truly, Land of the Free (to exploit).
I hope Washington is enjoying the show.
He fought to keep America the way it was. Ya he was part of the problem.
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.
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.
What’s the cost difference between this and hiring rotating shifts of nurses anyway? I know the equipment wouldn’t be there but yeah
A lot of people need more care than just a nurse, they need meds and to be monitored and medical aids or devices, like special beds or lifts.
Also the social aspect is pretty significant
The rent is super expensive, that’s the answer
A lot of it (definitely not all of it) seems to be that Americans want things and don’t want to pay for them. They demand care for the elderly but refuse to pay what it costs to staff a decent facility. They want healthcare but refuse to pay what healthcare workers are worth. But far more than that, they refuse to pay more than absolutely minimal taxes, unless they are terrified into doing so–fear of foreigners, Black people, immigrants, communism, etc. They’ve been believing politicians for decades who promise them the moon with no tax increases.
So Americans want healthcare but refuse to vote for a candidate who will divert money from cops or weapons toward making it affordable. They want college education for all their kids but keep voting for candidates who are Tough On Crime and Tough On Government Corruption while dodging questions about funding public education. They want better wages and jobs but keep voting for “pro business” candidates who remove regulations so companies can outsource the jobs to nations with cheaper labor. They want cheaper prices on everything but keep voting for candidates who block antitrust regulations and remove barriers to shareholder stock buybacks.
There’s just enough distance between the voting decisions and their consequences that voters can convince themselves–they’re motivated to–that the consequences are not connected to their decisions, and they’re always provided with a raft of rationalizations in case they figure it out. It’s motivated reasoning on top of ignorance. Like all good cons, these prey on the selfishness and greed of the hundred million or so marks.
This is not up to your average American worker. They don’t choose where their money goes after they spend it and they don’t the have a real choice otherwise. There is no well known burger joint that pays their workers a living wage. These are ultimately the decisions American business leaders make.
American managers do generally pay a much better salary to healthcare workers but only because the profit margins are insane and often literally made up.
As far as paying taxes it really depends on where you live. Certainly the fear of paying taxes exists in depressed red states but most blue states and metropolitan areas pay more taxes and get more services because of it. People live in these areas because they are good for families.
What America wants and what they vote for are two different things and this is related to politicians not being held accountable for anything. You can say you will do one thing and the moment you are elected you can do just the opposite without consequence.
Voting in the US has pretty much become just a rubber stamp for what the wealthy want. If people won’t vote for it, they just do it anyways as seen in the current administration. This is because the government was designed by the wealthy for the wealthy and democracy exists only as a facade at the Federal level.
Swing and a miss
The issue isn’t paying for it. It’s paying for it and not getting anything in return.
Daycare costs the same as a full time job, and there are a dozen kids there, yet the workers there earn minimal wages.
Healthcare is the same, pay thousands yearly for insurance just to pay thousands more of you ever need to go to the hospital or anything outside a routine preventative checkup
I never said we get what we think we’re refusing to pay for, just that Americans think they can get something for nothing.
