
Preventable deaths for residents, huge cost for taxpayers, and degraded working conditions for care workers — there can be no doubt that the financialization of elderly care homes has been deeply detrimental to the majority of Europeans.
transform! europe is a network of 39 European organizations and foundations, one of which is the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation.
Put simply, privatization has negative effects on residents’ health as well as on the working conditions for care workers themselves. But even if it is detrimental to the majority, that is not the case for everyone: a handful of private businesses located in France, the UK, Germany, and Sweden are appropriating billions of euro in public funds to run care homes on behalf of, but outside the control of the state.
A new study published by transform! europe, the political foundation of the Party of the European Left, aims to understand how we ended up in this situation — and how to change it. Authored by a pan-European team of eight researchers and journalists from Croatia, France, Germany, Portugal, Spain, and Sweden, The Happy Few: How the European Elderly Care Homes Sector Has Been Financialised, Who the Trend Benefits, and Which Counterstrategies to Adopt investigates the mechanisms through which elderly care has been financialized in the EU and reflects on potential counterstrategies to curb this alarming trend.