mordechai9000Private equity turned vulnerable elderly people into human ATMs
My parents ended up being forced by circumstances to move into a retirement home about five years ago. Fortunately, the place turned out to be run by people who mostly cared about their clients and so my parents' lives were basically OK, except that the food sucked (which AFAICT is par for the course at retirement homes). But a few months ago the place was acquired by a different company, which is trying to squeeze out higher profits. Staffing and services are being cut, and prices are going up. Even the food got worse, which I didn't think was even possible. The response when someone complains is, "If you don't like it you are free to leave."
Yeah, right. My barely mobile 90-year-old parents, one of whom has Parkinson's, are just going to pack up and go. They know perfectly well that they have a captive audience.
Thankfully, my mother died before the acquisition, and my father died last week, only a few months after the acquisition, so I don't have to deal with this any more. But caveat emptor: if you ever go into a retirement home, think about what will happen if they change ownership. Even if it looks great, or even acceptable, now, there is no guarantee that it will still be great, or even acceptable, tomorrow, unless you somehow manage to negotiate such a guarantee. I have no idea what a contract provision like that would even look like. But I am going to be facing this problem myself some day, so I'd love to hear ideas.
I’m sure the new owners are scummy, but the fundamental problem isn’t scummy people. There’s lots of markets that are okay-ish notwithstanding scummy people. Even those with natural lock in effects.
The fundamental problem is it is at the intersection of two out of the three areas of the economy that have had insane cost growth over the last 30 years—-housing and healthcare (the third is education.) For the first one we know roughly what we need to do but won’t. For the second we don’t even have that.
> There’s lots of markets that are okay-ish notwithstanding scummy people.
It is not at all clear to me that there are "lots" of such markets, but that is neither here nor there. A prerequisite for an okay-ish market is that buyers need to be able to choose not to buy, and when you have literal limited mobility it becomes very difficult to walk away from your housing and care provider, either literally or figuratively.
That's not the fundamental problem.
The fundamental problem is that we have ceased demanding that our government produce reasonable outcomes.
The reasons for that are many, but it's a core sign of how far we've fallen that there's even a discussion or argument about this obvious fact. We are in charge. We can just ban private equity companies from doing this you know.
There didn't used to be ambiguity about the point of having a society and having that society governed by the people and having those people's representatives solve problems like this.
That ambiguity was created on purpose, for money, by specific people. Not coincidentally, they're the same people making the profits in this story.
> housing and healthcare (the third is education.) For the first one we know roughly what we need to do but won’t. For the second we don’t even have that.
Healthcare costs increasing is of very little concern to nursing facility ownership. Almost none of that is borne by the facility itself. They'll often hire skeletal crews of CNAs and LPNs (I was a paramedic, rare was it to see a facility in our area that even had an RN, and if they were, they were the DON, Director of Nursing, and had no direct hand in patient care). The facilities would contract with a physician service who oftentimes would not even speak to the patient, let alone -see- them.
And every, every single interaction with actual care provision was fully billed to the patient/resident's insurance. Anything that is not a profit making center for facility ownership is ruthlessly subcontracted out. A solid portion of the SNFs in my county will openly call 911 for anything beyond the most absolute basic first aid, even when their employees are ostensibly better educated/trained than the EMTs who might be responding.
Healthcare costs in the US are an abomination, but that's not the issue here, or not directly.