| ▲ | jezzamon a day ago | |
Retirement villages seem particularly impacted by Baumol's cost disease. Combine that with aging societies and the general neglect often given to elderly people, I'm not optimistic about us being able to provide a reasonable quality of life for our elders in the future... | ||
| ▲ | rangestransform a day ago | parent | next [-] | |
Anything that has less productivity increase than the most productive sector of the economy is subject to cost disease to some degree | ||
| ▲ | mrguyorama a day ago | parent | prev [-] | |
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? | ||