Welcome to Everyday Elders
Care, not profit — through illness, aging, and death.
“Greed is good.”
In the movie, it was a warning. In your mother’s nursing home, it’s the business model — not by accident. The law that governs these companies doesn’t just permit greed. It requires it.
Not merely legal. Mandated.
If that lands wrong in your gut, you’re in the right place.
Welcome to Everyday Elders. I write about the dignity and rights of elders and the people who care for them — and about freedom from the exploitation that strips both of their dignity. The sharpest edge of that work is financial: how the elder-care industry turns suffering into profit. But money is the front line, not the whole story.
Here’s what I believe, and what you’ll get here.
What I believe.
Every human life has worth that does not diminish with age, illness, or dependence. The frail, the confused, the dying — they are not lesser people, nor are they spent assets. They are our mothers and fathers, and one day we will become them. Dignity is not earned by productivity, nor is it forfeited in a hospital bed.
And the people who care for them — the family members, the aides, the chaplains — have equal worth. A system that grinds down caregivers to cut costs commits the same offense as one that warehouses elders for a profit.
Exploitation is the deepest evil we can do to one another. Care, not profit: elder care is supposed to be about care — honoring that dignity to the very end. Profit is what it has quietly become. When a human being is treated as a revenue stream rather than a person, something sacred is violated, not merely an economic matter. This publication exists to name that exploitation, expose it, and help end it — through illness, aging, and death.
What you’ll get
Some pieces lead with a human story and then show you the money machinery underneath — the related-party shells, the sale-leasebacks, the management fees, the ownership webs — in plain language, with receipts. Others focus on the caregivers, the rights, and the daily indignities and small liberations of growing old in America. No jargon walls. No pretending this is too complicated for you to understand. It isn’t. They just prefer you don’t look.
Who I am
I spent more than forty years as a chaplain in nursing homes and retirement facilities, sitting with people through illness, aging, and death. I also have an accounting and finance background, and I’ve spent years learning to read the financial statements these companies would rather you didn’t see. The chaplain in the room and the accountant who can read the books — that’s the whole point. I know what the extraction costs because I sat with the people it was taken from.
Why subscribe
If you have a parent, a spouse, or a future of your own in this system — or if you’re one of the people doing the caring — which is all of us — you deserve to understand where the money goes, what it does to the person in the bed, and what it does to the person at the bedside. Subscribe (it’s free), and every piece lands in your inbox.
Everything here is free. There’s no paywall — the argument is too important to lock up. Everyday Elders is a publication of the Ars Moriendi Project, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit. If the work matters to you and you’re able, a tax-deductible donation helps keep it independent and going.
Subscribe (free) — start reading.
Donate — support the work of the Ars Moriendi Project (tax-deductible).
Thank you for being here. Now let’s follow the money.