I thought that the nursing home charged an outrageous amount for the care of my father. So I invested in nursing home stocks.
I lost a chunk of money, they turned out to be lousy investments.
If they are making fabulous profits, I'm not seeing it in the stock performance.
It seems like the PE firms are squaring this circle by offering diminished services, turning away sicker patients, and so on, or that's what the article says.
But is the staffing and standard of care different? Do the patients of investor owned hospices suffer with a higher incidence of bed sores? Do they suffer longer?
Unless they are defrauding these people, I don't see the issue in profits off of hospice. Hospice availability is a huge issue. The only thing worse than paying a lot for hospice is not getting hospice because there are no vacancies. If the profit incentive to run a nursing home or palliative care facility were eliminated, supply would fall through the floor creating a bigger issue than someone having the gall to earn money.
And supply would fall because no one is doing this sort of work out of the goodness of their own hearts, unless they are religious. And there are quite a few religious facilities out there but the numbers are dwindling.
When the simple majority of Americans are priced out of this kind of care from bloated profit margins how does that differ substantively from a lack of vacancies? While you're grappling with that here's another one: Mondragon and it's constellation of affiliate co-ops rather soundly puts the lie to the notion that profit motive is the sole driver of human activity. Apparently the world isn't entirely populated by sociopaths so it's still possible to get shit done without making a handful of individuals grotesquely wealthy in the process.
Mondragon is absolutely a for-profit, money-motiviated firm. It doesn't do things for free. The difference is that the shareholders are the employees rather than investors.
There is nothing illegal about starting a co-op, but in practice they are quite difficult because of the capital needed up front to start a business. That is to say, it's much easier to ask a VC for $5 million in series A funding than it is for the 10 devs running the thing to put up $500,000 each of their own money.
You're pretending financial institutions don't exist (business loans are absolutely a thing) and that all forms of profit-taking are ethically equivalent. What, exactly, are you stanning here?
These places are often operating with ratios like 30 patients under the care of a single nurse making $30k a year. They will charge the state $12k a month for the service.
They charge a high price because what is the state going to do, NOT put people in an old age home when they have no where else to go? It's a completely captured market, because the government isn't allowed to run it's own system, because that would be "socialism" and "death panels".