6 ms·
So why are nursing homes so expensive?
by th0ma5 11mo ago
So why are nursing homes so expensive?
- WarOnPrivacy 11mo agoThe most visible difference is nursing homes are owned by publicly traded entities, who come with massive overhead of shareholder obligations and executive salaries.
- Nextgrid 11mo agoPublicly traded entities which are components of many pension funds. The boomers essentially took out a loan against themselves, and now it's due, with interest to boot. There's some schadenfreude seeing the boomers complain about getting the enshittification treatment they themselves got rich off.
- WarOnPrivacy 11mo ago> Publicly traded entities which are components of many pension funds. A shareholder relationship is parasitical and exploitive by it's nature, as defined by Dodge Brothers v. Ford. Making pension funds feed on that relationship - that is whatever that is. I couldn't call it a necessary evil because it's by design.
- missedthecue 11mo agoSeems unlikely. Non-profit nursing homes are not noticeably more price-competitive with the for-profit ones.
- toomuchtodo 11mo agohttps://www.cnbc.com/2025/03/01/why-nursing-homes-and-hospice-are-so-expensive-in-the-us.html https://www.cnbc.com/2025/03/01/why-nursing-homes-and-hospic...
- kelseyfrog 11mo agoBaumol effect. TVs[1] are unrealistically cheap. This means that more money is chasing less automatable services. There is no technology that makes caregiving 100x more labor efficient. More money chasing the same supply means prices rise until demand reaches equilibrium. No amount of deregulation can increase the labor efficiency of caregiving to match gains in goods production. 1. And other goods mass manufactured.
- Nextgrid 11mo ago"Line must go up". The same line boomers enjoyed riding on while their property and other investments went up massively without any effort on their part, at the expense of subsequent generations. Now, they're getting a taste of their own medicine as someone else (private equity in this case) wants to ride the line going up and even just robbing subsequent generations isn't enough to pay for it.
- CarpaDorada 11mo agoYou too will grow old and then... you too will be blamed for everything.
- Nextgrid 11mo agoI'm sure there would be plenty of things to blame me for, but I'm still waiting to be able to sit and do nothing while my assets grow by an order of magnitude effectively risk-free, and be able to influence local policies to protect that growth no matter the cost. Instead, it seems like the very opposite is happening, with my labor being used to subsidize boomers to this day.
- koverstreet 11mo agoI also don't recall anyone ever blaming the WWII, or other generations like this. Boomers coasted off the success of the postwar era, and now we're all poorer for it.
- acdha 11mo agoYou’d have to go back a long time: the silent generation invested a lot in the public good from electrification to the GI Bill to roads to education and environmental protection. It took the Reagan era cuts to start rolling back investment in the country—I grew up in California during the 80s and 90s and each of the schools I went to had visible decline because they had built infrastructure prior to Prop 13 and then couldn’t afford basic upkeep.
- Analemma_ 11mo agoCertainly privately owned ones skim a lot off the top to pay shareholders and bonuses, but the reality is that the cost of caregiving is almost entirely labor and rent, and those things do not benefit from efficiency gains, so the cost of service just goes up forever because of Baumol's cost disease. Realistically the only way to stabilize the price of caregiving is to automate the hell out of it, like Japan is trying to do. It's a rather dystopian thought that the only way senior care won't bankrupt us is if we have robots do it all, but what can you do.
- CarpaDorada 11mo agoThe Baumol effect is only one component and not the entire story. Those that run these services will extract as many profits as possible for themselves. When the robots will manage geriatric care, there is no reason to not continue exploiting the patients' wallets.
- Nextgrid 11mo ago> labor and rent Labor, who pays a sizeable chunk of their income on rent... and rent, well is rent. Rent is only expensive when demand outstrips supply, and demand keeps being artificially constrained by existing property owners (of which boomers are a large chunk) not willing to take a hit on their property value. Seems like a self-inflicted problem.
- deleted 11mo ago[deleted]
- daedrdev 11mo agolabor cost, which is high because of high housing costs and other jobs that provide good pay competing with nursing home jobs
- bryanlarsen 11mo ago24/7 labor is expensive. The goal is to have a 1:10 ratio of nurses to patients, but to get 24/7 coverage you need almost 5x as many nurses. Add other staff: food, cleaning, maintenance, executive/secretarial, etc and you have about as many non nursing staff as nursing staff. So in other words you are covering the loaded labour rate for about 1 salary per occupant.
- missedthecue 11mo agoIt takes the same amount of land, nurses, and orderlies to care for a 100 old people as it did in 1970, but the land, nurses, and orderlies all cost more on an inflation adjusted basis. Classic Baumol's cost disease.
- TitaRusell 11mo agoCulture has changed though. My mother is 69 and she'd rather commit euthanasia than spend the last years in a nursing home. People born after 1945 are used to making their own choices and living by their own rules.
- WarOnPrivacy 11mo agoI'm in the group of upcoming retirees who can't ever afford to retire - and understand that homelessness is one of our very-possible outcomes. For the millions of folks who get insufficient winning hands in life, a nursing home is far from the worst outcome.
- lucyjojo 11mo agonursing people has always been expensive. it's just that everything else's price dropped (economy of scale, new technology etc.) while nursing stayed as expensive as ever.