LTC is risky, as others have pointed out.

My company offers one that claims to be reliable (owned by an insurance company that's been around for over 100 years, albeit not in the LTC space).

The one thing I didn't like about them: They don't adjust for inflation. So if you sign up for a $100K plan, you'll get $100K - which will worth a lot less by the time I need it.

> I think it is everyone’s duty to buy long-term care insurance (perhaps the government should provide this, as we will all need it)

this is called Social Security

The problem with LTC insurance is it’s likely to go belly up and you are at the end of the day dealing with an insurer whose business model involves denying valid claims. All of that is assuming you can actually get LTC insurance. Good luck if you are over 50. It’s like the private form of social security, a Ponzi that’s approaching its moment of truth.

Retirement is a stupid concept.

One of my Grandfathers just stopped taking medication and going to the docs. And died quite peacefully within a couple years of retiring. Death and decay is just natural and quick. While my other grandfather has been kept alive 30-35 years post retirement popping a tray full of pills everyday, having gone through dozens of surgeries and has had hopeless quality of life post retirement.

The med-industrial complex is a run-away train that is detached for any moral system. It can't even produce any morality anymore. Because its not efficient or rational to do so :)

Retirees are more likely than not to have built up at least a small pension or 401(k)[USA]: money sitting there earning interest and capital gains. You don't think the Aging Industry is going to just sit around and not try to grab as much of it as they can? They are going to do their best to ensure the system is set up to let them harvest those accounts dry.

Maybe that's bad?

Nihilistic sarcasm makes you sound cool and knowledgeable! /s

Exactly. I just tried fact checking the "milking" bit. Looking up lists of care home groups, Allegra Care came up first. Looking at their financial statements (all public, and include full details of profit and loss, thanks to UK company law), their profit in 2024 was 30k, and in 2023 they had a 300k loss. So not exactly milking!

I think running a care home isn't a great way to make a huge profit.

The kind of facility and services provided are quite expensive.

What I think is more frustrating is that they aren't upfront about the costs; although I think many of the residents wouldn't live there if they were upfront about the costs, even though they can afford it.

Otherwise, it seems like some very basic reform about explaining costs is needed, and some reform to prevent episodes like the lady laying on the floor for 45 minutes.

Maybe the buy-back scheme?

> when he dies, the company will buy back his share from his next of kin for less than he originally paid.

Anything that has less productivity increase than the most productive sector of the economy is subject to cost disease to some degree

It's not Baumols cost disease, it's a completely captured audience.

You are getting older and can't take care of yourself. You worked hard your entire life so you have non-zero assets.

Your options are: Sign away everything you have and more to a company in the hope that they will take care of you according to the contract. Or die in your own filth or from tripping and falling in the tub.

Medicare doesn't take care of you until you are destitute, so your only option is to pay whatever a company is asking.

These companies charge $20k a month, but pay their actual laborers peanuts, like we are talking hourly wages that are barely competitive with good construction jobs despite requiring training and spending all day literally wiping down human shit. You will be lucky to have one employee taking care of 30 of you.

All that money is just fed back to shareholders. And building real-estate in the priciest parts of built up cities. Grandma literally can't leave the facility because she's got the dementia and the kids are all in another state so why even build the facility in the middle of a city with skyrocketing housing costs and real-estate prices? Because your clients will pay anything, and that will leave you with a great high value asset that a facility out in a cheaper area would not.

It's just a neat little system for ensuring all those savings and retirement accounts built up by the boomers will not be inherited, and instead will be captured by very very wealthy people.

What possible mechanism could there even be for downward pressure on prices in this system? What are you going to do, NOT need help in your old age?

This is common but I haven't seen it so explicitly stated in the first popup.

You know how you are asked to agree to cookies even though you agreed recently on the same site? It's probably because they added a partner to the 1000 previous ones.

I've seen that wording a few times now in different places. I wonder who's aggregating all these smaller ad firms/data brokers.

It provides you the option of rejecting all cookies, which is what I did.

Not that I'm defending this, it's all terrible. But how many of us reading this article about to stump up for a paid subscription for Unherd? I'd wager next to none.

I just toggle the JavaScript off...

I didn't even see that, I guess because I have both popups and cookies blocked (with exceptions for cookies on a few websites I actually log in to) so it's not like they could store data even if they wanted to. I don't need to know about their attempts that are going to fail anyway.

Beware of generalizations, especially for cohorts of millions of people.

Surely, some of these people blocked development and did everything they could to boost their personal net worth at the expense of younger generations. Other people did the reverse. Most people just went with the flow and didn't bother to vote either way.

Gimme Jimmy! He's the elder law specialist. Saul is the shady criminal lawyer.

Wrong country! (Joke)

Ground rent is a bizarre UK property law concept. The resident will have paid for the leasehold of the property (typically a one off payment for 99 years occupancy which is transferable if they want to sell to someone else) but the company retains the freehold and can charge ground rent in return for absolutely nothing (this is different to a service charge which would fund things like communal space/facilities upkeep). This arrangement sort of makes a tiny bit of sense for apartments if you're being generous about it but there was a scandal in the UK that lots of regular houses were being sold leasehold not freehold with ground rent that started at a token level but ramped up significantly above inflation

They aren't new - but they tend to be called things like "integrated retirement communities" or similar.

> Why would they leave money on the table?

Because if they don't, the customer will go to the competition who does.

Is there a reason to believe this wouldn't happen under other economic systems?

Capitalism is a system. When you burn your food that is not end stage cooking, but a failure to manage cooking as a system. When your worn tires blow out while speeding causing you to fly off the road that is not end stage vehicular mobility, but irresponsible driving.

The last time Capitalism went unchecked and tried to eat itself was the Great Depression. That was ended by controlling Capitalism with strong regulations, high taxes on the rich, and pervasive union membership of workers. And the Social Security system and Medicare were also a part of that deal.

When people talk of "end stage Capitalism" all they are saying is that they lack the will and the power to use the tools we already know work to solve these problems.