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The traditional providers of end-of-life care for most of history were called your own children. This has changed over the last 75 years or so and now people ar
by missedthecue 3y ago
The traditional providers of end-of-life care for most of history were called your own children. This has changed over the last 75 years or so and now people are upset that the cost of providing messy, high stress, praiseless, 24/7 work costs a lot of money.
- emodendroket 3y agoYeah and failing that you were just destitute. Let's not act like that always worked out so great or is a serious solution for today's problems.
- missedthecue 3y agoIt's not the solution necessarily but income equals expenditure. They're one and the same. People need to stop pretending that the true cost of hospice care is much cheaper than what's charged today. Look at what non-profits charge. It's still eye watering sums, and not much different than investor owned hospice care quotes. Your greatest hint into the fact that end of life care genuinely costs a lot is that LTC insurers keep going bankrupt. Insurance companies don't like going bankrupt.
- jjeaff 3y agoIt doesn't cost nearly as much as they charge though. Otherwise, private equity wouldn't be getting involved.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- missedthecue 3y agoLook up the prices charged by non-profit hospice care. It's not much different from investor owned hospice care.
- simfree 3y agoBut is the staffing and standard of care different? Do the patients of investor owned hospices suffer with a higher incidence of bed sores? Do they suffer longer?
- emodendroket 3y agoThe article suggests the nonprofits are getting sicker patients the for-profits don't want to take.
- forgetfreeman 3y agoAccurate, and it does nothing to address the central issue, namely someone is making a fucking killing off of individuals at their most vulnerable.
- missedthecue 3y agoUnless they are defrauding these people, I don't see the issue in profits off of hospice. Hospice availability is a huge issue. The only thing worse than paying a lot for hospice is not getting hospice because there are no vacancies. If the profit incentive to run a nursing home or palliative care facility were eliminated, supply would fall through the floor creating a bigger issue than someone having the gall to earn money. And supply would fall because no one is doing this sort of work out of the goodness of their own hearts, unless they are religious. And there are quite a few religious facilities out there but the numbers are dwindling.
- forgetfreeman 3y agoWhen the simple majority of Americans are priced out of this kind of care from bloated profit margins how does that differ substantively from a lack of vacancies? While you're grappling with that here's another one: Mondragon and it's constellation of affiliate co-ops rather soundly puts the lie to the notion that profit motive is the sole driver of human activity. Apparently the world isn't entirely populated by sociopaths so it's still possible to get shit done without making a handful of individuals grotesquely wealthy in the process.
- WalterBright 3y agoI thought that the nursing home charged an outrageous amount for the care of my father. So I invested in nursing home stocks. I lost a chunk of money, they turned out to be lousy investments. If they are making fabulous profits, I'm not seeing it in the stock performance.
- emodendroket 3y agoIt seems like the PE firms are squaring this circle by offering diminished services, turning away sicker patients, and so on, or that's what the article says.
- Ekaros 3y agoActually I would guess that it is pretty expensive to run. You need the staff fulltime there and then the space and often equipment. Just doing the math of staff to patients, takin in account that you need full time support. It starts to add up.
- emodendroket 3y agoI don’t think that’s in serious dispute, but it also seems obvious that PE forms wouldn’t touch it if they didn’t see a way to make money.
- mrguyorama 3y agoThese places are often operating with ratios like 30 patients under the care of a single nurse making $30k a year. They will charge the state $12k a month for the service. They charge a high price because what is the state going to do, NOT put people in an old age home when they have no where else to go? It's a completely captured market, because the government isn't allowed to run it's own system, because that would be "socialism" and "death panels".
- FranzFerdiNaN 3y agoI don’t think history supports this thesis. Most children went away to the cities or other countries or even other continents. Maybe if you where one of the fewer and fewer people who still had a farm you might have one child taking it over, but if you were born in a city then that’s obviously not possible. I guess it might be possible you moved to where one of your children lived, if you even knew where they ended up.
- Sankozi 3y agoYou are describing last 100 years of US history and it is not "most of the history". What you are describing was still not prevalent through the world like 50 years ago.
- dukeyukey 3y agoThis is very very recent North America-and-other-settler-colony history. Even today, most Americans live within 20 miles of their parents. Most people don't live in different settlements to their parents, let alone cities, let alone countries, _let alone_ continents.
- emodendroket 3y agoAnd yet we still have hospice care. It is almost like just saying your adult children should take care of it isn’t an adequate solution.
- mrguyorama 3y agoMost of the "solutions" in history were to just let unfortunate people suffer and look away while they cry out.
- pyuser583 3y agoFirst line for elder care was, and still is, spouses. Usually one needs care before the other.
- shreyshnaccount 3y agoAnd perhaps more importantly community.