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Notes -
Even at minmum wage, 24/7 care is $5,580 per month (actually more with healthcare and Social Security contributions).
That's the problem. To earn a living if you're working as a care assistant, you need a certain level of wages. And then the home needs to cover all the other expenses, and turn a profit on top of that. So it's expensive to have paid care for the elderly.
But the days of "unmarried daughter lives at home to look after elderly parents" or "eldest son takes them into his home when he marries and they become dependent" are also gone, because most people do need to have two wages coming into the household, or they live far away from their parents, or they are too busy with their own lives. So some kind of paid care is needed.
And yet people still have the lingering views from the days when families took care of the older generations about "well how hard can it be to look after kids/old people, why is childcare/nursing home care so expensive?"
Unqualified labour, migrant labour, and hoping for robots to do care work is the idea for keeping costs down. How well does that work? Will we get care robots that can cope with handling humans? Who knows?
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