I think someone wrote a manifesto about this once.
Another one got caught today, it’s all over the papers. “Teenager Arrested in Computer Crime Scandal”, “Hacker Arrested after Bank Tampering”… Damn kids. They’re all alike.
I think a lot more people would be willing to swallow the cost of a nursing home, if the loved one was guaranteed proper care and respect.
And let me tell you, I’ve worked in a lot of nursing homes (not in a medical position), and it doesnt matter how high end the nursing home is, the treatment is the same across the board.
There are ways you can try to tip the system in your favor to increase the chances of getting better care for your loved one.
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Visit Frequently. Every Day is best (but if you had that kind of free time you’d probably have your loved one at home instead of a facility). Residents who get frequent, regular visits tend to get better taken care of.
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Try not to have a visitation pattern, To avoid staff taking care of your loved one in preparation for that day. If you do have a schedule to visit every saturday, then atleast a few times a month try to pop in on different day at random (and don’t make it a pattern)
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If your loved one can not advocate for themselves, put a granny cam in the room. You can decide if you want an overt one or a hidden one. Preferably one you can log into from home/where ever and monitor live, though this may require some kind of subscription.
3a) If your loved one can advocate for themselves, make sure they feel safe and secure to tell you any mistreatment/bad things/unacceptable response times they may be suffering. You’d be surprised how hard it can be to get an at risk relative to confess any mistreatment to you.
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Be respectful to the staff until they prove otherwise. Sometimes sucking up, and little gifts, and just generally getting to know the staff involved in your loved one will get your loved one better treatment.
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Do not hesitate to take issues up with the building administrator. The administrator is the highest authority in the building, and doubly do not hesitate to escalate things to your state oversight agency if the administrator fails to satisfy the issue.
4&5 TLDR) Be sweet and kind to staff, but don’t hesitate to be a roaring asshole when needed.
and I want to be clear, none of this will guarantee good/better treatment for your loved one. It just increases the chances of good/better treatment. Some people are just too lazy, cruel, and lack a single ounce of give-a-fuck to care. and some facilities try to cut costs by hiring only people that have all but been blackballed from other facilities, at low wages, because the choice for worker is either continue to use the education and experience they have or start over at even lower wage in a whole new job they know nothing about, which means they are typically at the end of their give-a-fuck. But sometimes you can have a facility run by absolute goddamn angels… and its too random to be able to predict.
Edit
Oh, and one last thing…if you do have something you need to elevate to regulatory boards, make sure you get photo/video evidence if you can. and I mean of bed sores, unattended diapers, personal diary logs of wait times when the clal nurse button is hit, etc etc etc. Evidence is key.
Why pay $80,000 per year in an expensive country for mediocre care when I could spend $10,000 for my parents in our cheaper home country for exceptional care. There’s like almost 200 countries in the world and life can be very very nice in honestly most of them with a bit of money.
Edit: this is a very useful strategy for dual citizens or people with family in more than one country and ultimately taking money earned in a wealthier country and bringing it to the economy of a poorer country is a benefit to the poorer country. I’m not saying this is a solution for everyone, but it is a very valid situation for some people. One could retire early or enjoy a much higher standard of living and care by just leaving a higher COL location. The same can be done within a country such as leaving the city and moving to a rural area where the COL is much lower.
because not everyone can fucking afford to uproot their entire lives to move their entire family to another country at the drop of a hat, on the hope and prayer that they can get any residency/citizenship papers fast tracked and not take a year+ of waiting on it, which will most assuredly be denied since normal people wont be rich enough to fund it and show they wont be a burden to the state.
Jesus fucking christ, the absofuckinglute stupid entitlement of this comment.
So fucking tired of rich fuckwits and know nothing fucking idiots chiming in with the same tired trope of “Oh well, dont like muricuh? then move to another country! heuh heuh heuh” as if its such an easy, affordable fucking thing to do. Trust me, I wager a LOT of people would like to get out of this fucking cesspit if they could.
Some people are dual citizens. I’m not saying this is for everyone but it is a very valid situation for some people. Generally speaking taking money earned over a lifetime in a wealthier country and injecting it into a poorer country is a benefit to the poorer country.
Can you just go there? Don’t you need a visa?
Hi, I would like to immigrate so I can take advantage of your free health care now that I am the most expensive patient to care for. Also, I cannot work or contribute to the economy. Is there a hospice visa?
Some people are dual citizens and generally earning money from a wealthy country and injecting it into a poorer economy is beneficial.
The same can be done to a degree within any country by retiring in from a high COL location to a low COL location such as retiring from the city to a low COL rural locations
It’s called being a dual citizen :)
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We were paying double daycare until recently. While it was never inexpensive, it was more manageable when our daycare center was locally owned. Then Kindercare came in and bought 80% of daycares in my major city. When we tried changing daycares we found that many daycares not explicitly named Kindercare were still under the Kindercare umbrella but retained their old name. I guess they caught on.
As SOON as the corporate takeover was complete they started increasing rates 8% per year BEFORE we had high inflation, instituted mandatory annual fees just to enroll, and mandatory fees for supplies that we use to be able to bring but now they charged us MORE than the supplies cost and they were super shitty quality items. So if you wanted to bring in supplies for your kid, you still got to pay the fee for supplies but then also had to buy the non shitty quality ones and bring them in.
To the point of the topic though, what pissed me off the most was that even though we paid 3k/month for two our center started bleeding employees because they simply wouldn’t pay them anything. So what this meant is veteran teachers left for more pay and new ones were only there long enough to get experience.
Services are expensive. Where I’m from daycare is socialized but still considered expensive. I imagine a full price in for profit daycare must be brutal.
Like $800 to $1200 per month per child in the US.
The USA is just 3 Corporations in a trench coat. And corporations are just pyramid schemes.
People will lose their minds if you suggest giving someone medical care for free, but they keep ignoring all the landlords and CEOs and private equity groups and all the middlemen extracting the vast majority of all the wealth out, while also contributing the absolute least.
The fact that we have a system where one person works every waking minute of their life and still can’t afford basic food and housing and another person sits around all day on their 3rd yacht sipping one of a kind wines and rakes in billions is insanity.
Truly, Land of the Free (to exploit).
I hope Washington is enjoying the show.
He fought to keep America the way it was. Ya he was part of the problem.
I skimmed the comments and didn’t catch this, but don’t forget about all the PRIVATE EQUITIES buying up nursing home facilities, banking on SSI, Medicare and Medicaid funding, upcharging perscriptions, “maximizing efficiencies” (aka paying as little wages as possible), and the revolving door of customers…
Is that why they’re defunding community care? 🤔
Don’t forget those private equities buying up life insurance companies that are being used for dumping grounds for bad loans that’ll be bailed out through state-based guaranty funds instead of passing through bankruptcy. In other words, these private equities are using life insurance subsidiaries to offload the risk of bad loans (mostly AI-related) to taxpayers if those life insurance companies become insolvent, which will likely happen when the AI bubble pops.
The solution is this: every sector of the economy has been optimized to extract as much money from everyone as possible. This is the implicit role of government–to help the rich get richer. Have an idea that makes money? The government will help you make it happen. Does it materially harm the public, like sports gambling? Then you better make a lot of money to pay off the politicos!
This through-and-through corruption means that we now graduate in lifelong debt, working jobs that don’t cover the rent of places we can never own and spend money on health insurance we can never use because we can’t afford the co-pays. We are forced to finance expensive car because that’s the only way to get to work because the bus routes have all been purchased by car companies and liquidated long ago while regulations keep out cheaper foreign cars for “safety” while massive trucks and SUVs are killing pedestrians and cyclists at record rates. Forced to work longer hours and with less money in our pockets, our third spaces disappear. Now stuck at home, we are forced to buy electronics now at inflated prices because of the AI bubble and use oligopoly internet that should have long ago been regulated as a utility but for the massive campaign contributions those companies make to politicians to have a shadow of a social connection with each other.
We are no longer citizens. We are livestock.
This is unsustainable.
That’s a pretty good summary of the situation, but it’s the problem, not the solution.
Sooner or later, something’s gotta bend or it’ll break. The oligarchs know this, and that’s why they’re putting so much effort into pacifying with false promises while tightening surveillance and control. They hope to starve us out or put us down before we reach our breaking point. They want us broken and weak long before it comes to that.
And honestly, the level of technology and the global hegemony of the capitalist order present us with a situation that’s never been seen before. The level of control and the efficiency of the surveillance state, the impersonal nature of automated weapons, makes for more than just an uphill battle. Calling ordinary people the underdogs is an overstatement of the hope we have.
And with more and more tyrants in the world learning what they can get away with, and the so-called “free world” opting for passivism and appeasement while handling their own internal threats with kiddie gloves and being more or less complicit with the plutocratic interests behind it all, it seems there’s very little hope this time for outside intervention saving us either.
So much rests on these midterms coming up. I hope they happen fairly and without too much ratfucking, I hope the people come out in droves to punish the fascists for what they’re doing to our democracy, and I hope the results of the election are duly acknowledged and the peaceful transfer of power happens smoothly. I hope enough people of good will make it into the next congress to successfully put a halt to the fascist agenda and block them from ratfucking our elections even worse, and I hope in two years we elect somebody who will restore our institutions and see justice done to those who have been dismantling it.
I don’t believe it’s too late for the world to make a comeback, but so much rests on these upcoming elections. Doomsayers will come out of the woodworks to try to discourage us from voting. We cannot listen to them.
It’s about money. But a nice side effect is that it keeps the people busy so they have little down time to reflect on why they are in that condition, or more importantly, no time left to take action, as well as the threat that if they do anything, it could endanger their job and life. That’s why they don’t take away too much from too many, otherwise suddenly those masses don’t have anything to threaten and a lot of free time to notice what happened and by whom. Bread and circuses.
100%, The New Deal in the USA was largely a result of the fear of a communist revoltuion during the Great Depression.
This is not the explicit role of government in a functional social democracy. Which the USA obviously are not.
They’re functional for the owners of the government, which are not the majority of constituents.
so what would be your first act as president
Whatever the corporate owners say it is.
After that speech, I guess I’d start trust-busting, but that’s presuming just being president would give me that power.
long way to go after that i guess
at least the markets might regain some of their function
The U.S. is an open air prison
Open-air farm.
Thats the billionaires squeezing profits out of every transaction, not just the enrollment fees, the rent on the property, the Healthcare and insurance premiums for the staff and the operation.
Everything they do is being optimized to squeeze wealth Into the mouths of billionaires.
Tax wealth not work.
Labor $200 Land $150 Materials $800 CEO pay and profits $1,000,000,000 Utility $150 someone who is good at the economy please help me budget this. my family is dying
Land more like 150,000
Oh yeah. I just left most of the numbers from the original meme because I didn’t feel like deciding on new ones.
Burn the CEO with candles until he accepts the unions demands.
One candle per worker and their loved ones they support
This makes me think of an issue we had around here recently. We have a public company running the majority of school buses in our area. They receive funding from the government that should be enough to pay their drivers around 24$ an hour. Yet, they’ve been paying them 18$ or less for years.
This year the drivers tried to negotiate for a higher wage and the owners weren’t even willing to go over 19$… So they went on strike and buses stopped; parents had to make alternative arrangements. This went on for weeks, the employer just kept playing hard ball and not budging.
Surprisingly, parents were overwhelmingly on the driver’s side which I was happy to see. It reached a point where the owners almost had their contract taken away. After about 2 months, they finally gave in and agreed to an increase to about 21$.
What kills me is that in another town nearby with a different company running the buses, divers are being paid 23-24$ an hour like they’re supposed to. So the employer still came out ahead after everything was said and done. Apparently, the owners are from Toronto (about 3-4 hours away from us) and are just using this company to make money which explains their unwillingness to increase their workers pay.
Unrelated rant: Typical big city rich assholes fucking over people in smaller communities. It happened during covid with housing, they came over and scooped up every house they could just to rent them out for profit. I was paying 1000$ for a 3 bedroom apartment and some asshole from Toronto came over and bought it. Then when I moved out, they increased the rent to fucking 2500$…
I’m a school bus driver myself. We’re unionized (Teamsters) and the district operates its own buses. We make about $34 an hour and get subsidized health insurance and a small pension (after 10 years) as well. A neighboring district privatized their school bus service a few years ago; their drivers make $22 an hour with no benefits at all, their accident rate is 4X ours and the drivers keep getting busted for positive drug tests and drunk driving, and their operating costs (as measured per student/per mile transported) went up about 50%.
It is such an absolute no-brainer to realize that the only advantage of privatizing a service like this is to put money into the pockets of the bus service owners (as well as the officials and school board members that they bribe), and the disadvantages are literally every possible other aspect of the deal. And yet surprise surprise my district is discussing privatization to “save money”. It doesn’t help that our newly-hired transportation director is a member of the family that owns the largest private bus service in the area.
They also have their equity firms buy up anything still quality and decent, enshittify the product and wait for people to catch on and stop buying the product. Then they do it all over again with another company.
Typical big city rich assholes fucking over people in smaller communities. Doesn’t matter where they are from, people can be assholes anywhere.
Damn, the school should make the contract have heavy penalties for each failed pick up.
It’s rent, and advertising. Shit costs so much and yet the landlord’s and advertising industry makes ya think it’s the cost of labour. I know alot of restaurant owners who work 5 days a week(alot close two days a week) and only vacation once a year just to visit family. they have steady business but still struggle due to costs. Only places I know are doing well are ones who own their building.
You forgot to add the billionaire shareholders variable to the equation
First, there is corporate gouging. Anyone owning stocks wants to see a return, not a moderate one but a big one, on their investment. Second, it isn’t a straight one to one employee to patient ratio. 24 hour care is 8760 hours per year and full time work is 2000 (with 2 weeks paid vacation) meaning 4.38 employee years for 24hrs, 365 days. It isn’t quite that much because staffing is never 1:1. If it were 1:1, at $20 per hour paid to the caregiver, with vacation, sick days, health care, CPP, EI, WCB, it is a minimum of $58,000 per employee. That alone would work out to $4800 per month without housing, food, cleaning, equipment. It isn’t cheap to house people who cannot live independently. We need a different model for care to keep the costs lower while providing care that is necessary. This used to all be “free” in-home by older women (Boomer, Silent Gen, Greatest Gen) and still often is, if they cannot access care for family members. Much like child care, that again women used to do for 'free", it costs real money to have someone else cover that work.
They’re not paying CNA that amount.
Long-term direct care for humans at any stage of life in the US (that aren’t of extreme wealth) is both obscenely expensive and yet woefully inadequate. I work in brain and spinal rehab AFCs and we’re far worse than most average nursing homes.
It adds up…
It adding up is the problem.
Because it means “job creators” who do nothing but posses titles to land and company stocks are syphoning off money.
If they need 3 staff for 21 kids, they’re going to pay as little as they can to keep 3 staff. And charge as much as they can to keep 21 kids.
There’s no correlation between what staffing costs and what prices are charged, why would there be?
Both are just line items, and the person in charge just wants the profit line to have the biggest number.
The larger the company is, the worst that becomes. Or if the company is small, but owned by someone with a dozen other companies.
Expecting salary to match what people pay is toddler logic, sure it would be great if it worked like that, but any adult thinking more than 2 seconds can see why that’s not related in the modern age. Hell, its been decades since the “if we pay workers a living wage a value meal goes up $0.02!”.
Americans literally all said they were fine with that, almost zero companies increased pay, and all of them.increaswd prices anyways
There’s obviously no correlation
“In reality high profits tend much more to raise the price of work than high wages.”
But that quote is from famously woke Adam Smith in his wokeism opus magnum Wealth of Nations.
Labor is often the biggest expense, but it’s far and away not the only one. Any business might pay extractive rent, property upkeep costs, property taxes, business tax, administrative costs like bookkeeping and legal advisory, and insurance. (Any business involving the safety and well-being of more than a couple kids has to have unbelievable premiums just for liability.)
I wouldn’t be so quick to point fingers at the people running a fucking daycare ffs. If they run a tight ship, the owners are making at best a very basic, decent salary. they’re not fleecing parents. Even if they wanted to, they literally can’t.
Look instead at all those auxiliary industries which are required for legal compliance - especially the “consultant class” - legal, tax/accounting, and insurance. They have leeches attached all the way up the chain, starting with individual workers.
