The senior population is booming. Caregiving is struggling to keep up

For 10yrs, I supported 1-3 agencies that owned/ran group homes for developmentally disabled adults.

These included homes for clients who were non-ambulatory, clients who had profound health issues and one home for dd-so. Besides living and healthcare expenses, the agencies had regulatory overhead imposed by 3 different governing agencies.

Even with all of this, the clients had lives with daily offsite activities, jobs, public events, theme parks, etc.

The per-client budgets of these group homes were tiny compared to nursing homes. They were funded by client SS disability payments, supplemented by some modest public funding.

These homes where founded and administered by boards made up of the client's families. Importantly, they were non-profit; they lacked the massive overhead that comes with shareholder obligations and executive salaries+perks.

They've been providing superior care for over 4 decades. After I left, they began to experience a persistent risk of funding cuts. These were driven by a major hospital chain executive who became governor and then state senator.

So why are nursing homes so expensive?

"Line must go up".

The same line boomers enjoyed riding on while their property and other investments went up massively without any effort on their part, at the expense of subsequent generations.

Now, they're getting a taste of their own medicine as someone else (private equity in this case) wants to ride the line going up and even just robbing subsequent generations isn't enough to pay for it.

You too will grow old and then... you too will be blamed for everything.

I'm sure there would be plenty of things to blame me for, but I'm still waiting to be able to sit and do nothing while my assets grow by an order of magnitude effectively risk-free, and be able to influence local policies to protect that growth no matter the cost. Instead, it seems like the very opposite is happening, with my labor being used to subsidize boomers to this day.

I also don't recall anyone ever blaming the WWII, or other generations like this.

Boomers coasted off the success of the postwar era, and now we're all poorer for it.

You’d have to go back a long time: the silent generation invested a lot in the public good from electrification to the GI Bill to roads to education and environmental protection. It took the Reagan era cuts to start rolling back investment in the country—I grew up in California during the 80s and 90s and each of the schools I went to had visible decline because they had built infrastructure prior to Prop 13 and then couldn’t afford basic upkeep.