We paid them the prevailing wage and unlike our competitors made our caregivers employees that gave them access to benefits and worker's comp. But it also meant we could not compete with "independent contractor" competitors.

And yes, when I did that work in the 70s, I earned around $3.50 an hour. That was the prevailing wage then and I lived in a rented mobile home with two roommates sharing the cost. I was paid the prevailing wage under the same model, my company used, so I am not sure your point.

The prevailing wage is largely a function of the market. So, how much could you and people you know afford to pay someone to care for your parent 40 hours a week. Depending on the state, paying someone $14/hour plus benefits and a 2% profit would cost you $42,000 a year. So could you afford that, if you said, you wanted to the health care worker to earn $20 per hour, that would be fine with us a long as you could come up with the $14K as year or around $56,000/year.

Now one way to "pay" people more is to spread the cost over multiple seniors. You are correct, you can't automate the care, but you can concentrate it.

Senior care centers charging a little less per hour, than we had to charge, could afford to pay slightly more, since each worker is caring for 3-4 seniors, but the senior has to be driven to the center and "share" the person with three other seniors. Those facilities earn slightly more, but some of their profit margins on their worker's time goes to funding the building the seniors spend their day in.

You can talk about the living wage and argue what that is or is not, clearly thousands of people get by on this wage, but in most cases, these workers are "second income" workers and often immigrants with minimal educations and basic personal care skills (learned raising families and supplemented with training) and they enjoy the fact that the work is low stress and the majority of time they are acting as a "companion".

The government does not pay for this kind of care, and so the issue becomes how much can an elderly person or their children afford. Again, we earned around $12 million on $600 million of business or 2%... so its not our profit margins driving what we pay people.

I agree, I think the government should subsidize people that work full time and cannot earn what society considers a living wage because the prevailing wage for what they do is below that. I support the earned income credit and I supported the part of the Affordable Care Act that expanded Medicaid coverage to the working poor. But simply raising wages in certain industries like "home care" to what you might consider "fair" does not increase wages, it simply eliminates jobs and forces people to either stay home and care for their parents or bring them to an institutional setting where the cost of caring for them is less personalized.

I sense you have no idea about what you are talking about even though you have compassionate values. There is no "money tree" to fund the kind of services we provided. We squeezed margins as tight as we could (one third of the agencies this field went broke during the 90s, because margins were too small). Our society cannot afford what it is consuming today as measured by the huge debt our government and citizens carry. So, it is great to say pay more... but harder to figure out who to take the money from to do so... the refrain of the progressive liberal movement is to take it from the rich... but while they are rich, they are not rich enough to fund everything people want them to pay for, not even close.

So how much more are you willing to give up and at what point is working simply not worth it, if you give the government 50% of what you earn (60% in Europe).