| ▲ | ryandrake a day ago |
| 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. |
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| ▲ | RajT88 a day ago | parent | next [-] |
| Everyone wants to grab whatever seniors have. I've seen it. Children and other family squabble over the assets even before they pass. You'll see neighbors talking senile/demented seniors into giving away their stuff, or selling it for a silly low price (like a truck for a dollar, or my one neighbor asking my other neighbor for a free fishing boat). Then there's the scam calls... |
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| ▲ | mrguyorama a day ago | parent [-] | | The current elder care industry is optimized to ensure neighbors and children will have nothing left to fight over. Give it not too much longer, and someone somewhere will make it so debts will be inherited, and then we can all be milked even harder. |
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| ▲ | rco8786 a day ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Yea again, that's not different than anyone else with any other amount of money. For profit corporations are designed from the ground up to separate us from our money (or "milk" if you will). In reading the article, it doesn't seem to me that anyone is being taken advantage of any more than all of us are when we walk into a shopping mall, open amazon.com, or buy a home. |
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| ▲ | stouset a day ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| I would wager that’s exactly what the GP thinks. It was pretty clear to me they think the entire system is set up so that anyone with needs is milked to extract the maximum possible amount of money. |
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| ▲ | dendrite9 a day ago | parent | next [-] | | I know someone who started an elder care business with explicitly this purpose. He stopped working in the more conventional medical system because he saw an opportunity. Unsure how it is going at this point, I haven't checked in recently. Elder care is hard, and expensive. Friends have worked in various levels of it at various times, from food services on up. There is clearly some good for people to be around a community and there are real needs that require constant attention for some. But there is a drive to do more with less which almost always seems to end up with stories of people not being attended to as quickly as you might hope. Memory care is particularly difficult, on the family and on the businesses. It is just so all consuming and from the outside it can be hard to know if adequate care is being taken. Of course I do know someone who's mom put her dad into memory care, then moved and basically started a new life with a boyfriend while still married so she had access to the money. My parent's solution is to day they don't want to draw things out. But I think that is easy to say from a position of health and barring any significant diagnosis there is more of a slow slide to infirmity than a clear juncture to make such a choice. We'll see, my family is close and I expect we will provide care in person. But also life is complicated and that is a ways off. | |
| ▲ | rco8786 a day ago | parent | prev [-] | | I mean that's just trivially true right? For profit corporations are designed to maximize profits, therefore they must try to maximize the amount of money they extract from their customers. | | |
| ▲ | gtowey a day ago | parent | next [-] | | And now you know the entire reason the US is consumed by political chaos. A rational society would be regulating those corporations to ensure they act in the public best interest at least some of the time. We're seeing the result of what happens when we are 50 years behind on that. And the current administration is generally rolling back regulations all over. Think of the money at stake and it will become obvious that our current situation isn't mere happenstance. The chaos is a deliberate smoke screen -- perhaps not exactly planned by the current administration, but orchestrated by the oligarchs behind the scenes. | |
| ▲ | spwa4 a day ago | parent | prev [-] | | As opposed to public companies? Come to Northwest Europe and you'll find a very similar problem: elderly in homes, so incredibly understaffed that there simply isn't anyone to pick up someone who falls for hours. These days every few months there's a new "accident" reported in these places. They have been destaffed to dangerous levels. Apparently last months' issue was that the administration was wrong. A room that had an elderly person was registered as empty, but had an old lady inside. She starved to death because she was unable to leave the room and "didn't call for help" (probably didn't call loud enough). | | |
| ▲ | croon 13 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Those are generally private companies too, at least in Sweden, I would assume most of the nordics. That last 20-30 years have seen increasing privatization of services paid for with public funds, in everything from infrastructure, healthcare, eldercare and schools. Of course they maximize profits (maximizing residents, students, patients) and minimize costs (staff, care). It's the same problem, not a different one. | | |
| ▲ | spwa4 4 hours ago | parent [-] | | But that is not a property of private industry ... or I should say, it is, but it is not a difference with public industry. In public industry the name of the game is to maximize subsidy for minimal actual work done. Lots of people, but nothing happens. If you were alive in the 80s you would have seen this in action. People who "work" ... but not much at all. Many people, but zero activity. I'm told it was much worse in the 60s. |
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| ▲ | rco8786 a day ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | I'm not prescribing a solution nor passing any judgment. Simply making an observation. It's an incredibly difficult problem with no perfect solution. | |
| ▲ | throaway5445454 a day ago | parent | prev [-] | | prison life |
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| ▲ | ModernMech a day ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| That's the fun part about all of this. Boomers bought their houses for $30k in the 80s and today they're worth $3M. Sounds like they are set up comfortably for retirement and their millennial kids, who are pushing 40 and haven't been able to afford a house yet, are in for a nice inheritance. Wrong! Because while their house is worth $3M, it will be fully leveraged to pay for the cost of their deathcare. Mom and dad will die broke in a retirement home, and your inheritance will be paying for their funeral out of your own pocket. |
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| ▲ | ryandrake a day ago | parent | next [-] | | Yea, reverse mortgages are yet another underhanded scheme to harvest what remains of the elderly's wealth. Some CEO somewhere said "Well, we've already found a way to drain their health savings, their retirement and pension... what else can we get our hands on?" and poof! The Reverse Mortgage! They're not going to stop until they make debt inheritable, so they can soak the next generation before they even retire. | | |
| ▲ | ModernMech a day ago | parent [-] | | Oh yeah, and then there's those commercials you see on the channels with a 55+ viewership. They're selling things like this: https://www.ovidlife.com "Sell Your Life Insurance Policy. Turn your life insurance policy into an immediate cash payout" next to a picture of seniors vacationing on a yacht. Then they bring out Tom Selleck who looks in the camera and says "Would I lie to you? You can trust me!" |
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| ▲ | jerlam a day ago | parent | prev [-] | | Parents gotta transfer all their money to the kids, and then apply for government assistant because on paper, the parents have no money. | | |
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| ▲ | notmyjob a day ago | parent | prev [-] |
| Often by weaponizing elderly narcissism and exploiting cognitive decline in a quasi-legal fashion. |
