Daycare is a crazy one. Insanely expensive, yet the workers are damn near indentured servants.
It's honestly a major contributor to the labor shortage. For anyone with a decent job, it's significantly cheaper for the spouse to just stay home until the kids are old enough to take care of themselves.
Don't let the media force you to twist your words-- it is not a labor shortage, but a wage and cost of living crisis.
I read an interview, probably from NPR, but I can't find it at the moment. The upshot was that caring for infants is insanely expensive, since they need one-on-one care pretty much continuously.
But parents can't afford that cost, so, essentially, the price they charge for infant care is a loss-leader, and parents of older children (who need less supervision and thus more favorable staffing ratios) subsidize the cost of caring for infants. Daycare operators are barely keeping afloat.
Edit: Ah, here it is: Baby's first market failure
Run by private equity?
Most are, the investors need to make their money too! /s
It's a weird one because it's a huge expense but it's also completely concentrated to a subset of the population for a subset of their life. I think it should have a public option. 2 toddlers, not infants, could cost us 50k/year
Workers feel responsibility for the people under their care. Bosses exploit their guilt over untended people to reduce wages.
the US lost so many battles against corporate monopolies that now 4 companies own the majority of the US healthcare system.
i suggest medical care abroad if you'd like similar or better healthcare at a much lower price. travel offers much more than a vacation.
Thinking of going abroad for dental implants. An oral surgeon said it used to be an issue with poor-quality knock off parts, but that the manufacturing has gotten really good.
Countries keep cost low by subsidizing doctors' education, by the way, which is even more expensive for them when those doctors cash out to come to the US where doctors graduate with a debt of $250,000 from schools where graduation class size hasn't changed in decades.
By the by, intensive and indiscrimnate care by specialists--where doctors want to end up instead of low-paid primary care--is definitely more expensive without necessarily leading to better outcomes.
Dental work is my most common healthcare experience abroad. I cannot recommend Thailand enough, especially for dental work, nothing but 5 out of 5 dentistry for me so far.
3rd-party analyses and patient surveys rating Thailand higher than the US in health care these days are included in the link above. and here, why not?
It needs to be more than education. For instance, I know a county that subsidizes nursing school. But the nurses are paid a terrible salary and many leave to work in higher paying countries.
If they would just pay their nurses more, they wouldn’t need to subsidize the education and maybe skilled people would stay.
Very simple; the shareholders get value.
Its simple really. The management make all the money, while the workers and customers get shafted
Capitalism
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