Think about the people in our lives who need a helping hand: a person living with a disability, a toddler learning to walk, or a grandparent moving into a care home.
In a ideal world, looking after one another would be based on love, community, and respect. But today, care has become a massive, multi-billion-dollar business. Instead of treating care as a basic human right, our economy often treats it like any other product on a shelf—something to buy, sell, and squeeze for profit.
When we turn care into a business, we start treating the people who need that care like financial assets. While children, disabled people, and older adults are very different from one another, the big businesses running these sectors often treat them in the exact same way.
1. Disability for Sale
For disabled people, everyday life often requires support—whether that is a helper to assist around the house, specialized equipment, or accessible transport.
- Paying for basic freedom: When funding models give disabled people personal budgets to buy their own support, it sounds empowering. But in reality, it turns essential daily needs—like getting out of bed or taking a shower—into hourly charges on an invoice.
- Profiting from technology and equipment: Wheelchairs, modified vehicles, and communication apps are frequently sold at sky-high prices simply because people have to buy them.
- Prioritizing profit over people: Companies providing support workers often try to maximize their margins by keeping staff pay low and cutting down the time workers are allowed to spend with each person.
The Big Problem: Instead of removing barriers so disabled people can fully belong in their communities, the system often focuses on managing their needs as a permanent, profitable customer base.
2. Children as Business Opportunities
Early childhood centers used to be mostly local, non-profit playgroups or community initiatives. Today, daycare is big corporate business.
- Working parents have no choice: Most families need two incomes to survive, which means daycare is not a luxury—it’s a necessity. Companies know parents have to pay, allowing them to charge extremely high fees.
- Corporate chains taking over: Large private equity firms have bought up neighborhood daycares. Their focus is often on filling every room to capacity, standardizing everything, and sending profits back to investors.
- Treating kids like future workers: Daycares often market themselves by promising to make children “school-ready” or smarter faster. Rather than letting children just be children, the system starts viewing them as investments for the future workforce.
3. Rest Homes as Real Estate Deals
Aged residential care is perhaps the clearest example of big business making money off vulnerable people.
- Care homes run by property developers: Many modern rest homes are owned by large investment groups. To them, a care facility is not just a place where seniors live—it’s a valuable piece of real estate designed to pay out high returns to shareholders.
- A trapped customer base: If you are elderly and need 24-hour medical support, you cannot easily pack up and leave if the service is poor. Because residents often have no other choice, companies can raise fees while cutting back on services.
- Cutting corners to save money: To make more profit, facilities often hire fewer staff at minimum wage, rush meal times, or limit basic supplies like incontinence pads and specialized therapies.
How the Three Sectors Compare
| Disabled People | Children in Daycare | Seniors in Care Homes | |
| Why parents/people pay | To get support for daily life and independence | So parents can go to work | For safety, housing, and 24/7 medical help |
| Where the money comes from | Government support, insurance, or personal savings | Parent fees and government subsidies | Life savings, selling the family home, or pensions |
| How companies make money | Billing by the hour for support & selling gear | Charging daily fees per child | Charging for rooms, meals, and extra care fees |
| The biggest hidden cost | Support gets rushed into quick, timed tasks | Staff are overworked and underpaid | Rushed care, lack of staff, and social isolation |
The Big Takeaway: What Goes Wrong When Care Is a Business?
When we let profit run the care system, three major problems always occur:
- A Trapped Audience: Children, older adults, and disabled people cannot simply “walk away” if the service is bad. They need support to survive, which leaves them wide open to being overcharged and under-served.
- Underpaid Care Workers: The real heroics in care come from the workers—the support staff, early childhood teachers, and care assistants. Yet, because businesses want to cut costs, these jobs are almost always among the lowest-paid in society.
- Efficiency Over Human Connection: Business logic is all about speed and numbers: filling beds, ticking boxes, and keeping to strict time limits. But true human care cannot be rushed. You cannot schedule a meaningful conversation or a moment of comfort into a strict 15-minute slot.
Where Can We Go From Here?
Treating human vulnerability as a way to make money damages all of us. A healthy society doesn’t ask, “How much profit can we make from this person?” It asks, “How can we support this person to live a good life?”
To fix this, we need to move away from treating care like a retail market. We need to invest in community-run, non-profit care systems and start paying care workers fairly for the essential work they do. Ultimately, how we treat people when they need help the most shows who we really are as a society.
This article is part of a series advocating for the rights of disabled people, contributed by Dr. Pamela J. MacNeill, Managing Director, Disability Responsiveness New Zealand Ltd (admin@drnz.co.nz).
A “thank you” to Dr. Pamela J. MacNeil Managing Director at Disability Responsiveness New Zealand Ltd for sending this article to The Upper Hutt Connection.
05/10/26
