Coincidentally, I just saw two separate job ads on the subway looking for caregivers. Maybe the next booming sector would be taking care of retired boomers.
Retiree wealth mining is the next great gold rush!
One interesting scheme I recently came across is an assisted living home that doesn't take regular payments. Instead, they have their residents sign over their entire net worth at the event of their death, leaving nothing for their inheritors. The tradeoff is that they get to stay for as long as they live. Of course, this scheme has some obvious perverse incentives for the operators of the home.
This massive labor shift toward service work has been well underway across the US. See, eg, this excellent case study of how Pittsburgh's aging, shrinking cohort of unionized steel workers (with good health insurance) has been demographically offset by a growing (precarious, non-unionized) medical and care industry. Now the largest employer in Pittsburgh is the university medical center, and the largest sector is care workers.
I think that's a pretty unrealistic hope. I don't think the government is going to spin up up millions of workers to be in home caregivers and start building government funded nursing homes. That's not to mention the budget implications is such care.
Some states are looking at or implementing new mandatory Insurance programs nursing home care, but these are far too late for Boomers to pay into them in a meaningful way
> Some states are looking at or implementing new mandatory Insurance programs nursing home care, but these are far too late for Boomers to pay into them in a meaningful way
This has not stopped Washington state, for example, from allowing Boomers to benefit from these programs without paying into them in a meaningful way.
If you have medical necessity, Medicaid pays for long term nursing homes once you meet their financial requirements (spend down assets and have low enough income).
Some nursing homes specialize in medicaid patients, which isn't much different than a government funded nursing homes IMHO.
I fully agree that's the case. I was more addressing the idea of the government providing the services directly and cutting the private providers out of the loop
> From the generation that brought you Ronald Reagan,
The age groups that Reagan won were the ones that are (predominantly composed of, because the categories don't perfectly match generation boubdaries) Silents and older. The Boomer age groups were tied (22-29 went 44 Carter, 44 Reagan, 11 Anderson) or for Carter (18-21 went 45 Carter, 44 Reagan, 11 Anderson.)
The generation(s) that brought you Reagan are, for the most part, dead.
The boomer playbook has always been voting themselves benefits to be paid for by their children and grandchildren. This seems to be universal: liberal, moderate, or conservative. See the national debt.
> The boomer playbook has always been voting themselves benefits to be paid for by their children and grandchildren
The Boomers were in their prime working years when the Silents under Reagan did the US’s biggest tax burden shift onto them, and cut their expected benefits along with it.
