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Why is no one starting a new care facility that isn’t as profit-driven / greed-motivated?
https://www.medicare.gov/care-compare/?redirect=true&provide...
But even as the dementia (of my grandmother) progressed, the care facility was simply too understaffed and over capacity to take them in - it took us around a year to finally find a room.
Luckily the care they received there was good - but my plan is the following: If I get diagnosed with dementia, I'm going to end it on my own terms. Having witnessed dementia up-close as a caregiver, and then see other dementia patients...it is not a life. The person becomes an empty shell / husk of themselves.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> This touches upon something that Europeans generally don’t understand about Americans’ individual wealth: the very last years of your life can drain almost any retirement account. This is also true in some parts Europe. Retirement home is very expensive, and the service is usually mediocre at best. There's also been the same kind of stories with some kindergartens lately. On many services, we're much better off tha…
Europe also seems to more readily accept "A cold snap killed off thousands of elderly people living alone", and that's doubly true in the UK. It tends not to get covered in the US because after all it's very local news and we already barely cover major world events, but if you pay attention to country-specific news it's surprisingly grim. Maybe it was different before 2008, but since then in the age of "austerity" I…
It was plain during Covid. For most American media, the real news wasn’t how elderly people were dying like flies, but how somebody was forced to wear a mask.
I don't want to be judgmental because I know these are extremely difficult situations with no easy answers, but what strikes me about this article is that the author blames the profit motive after what can be uncharitably viewed as taking an elderly parent and paying a third party to make the "problem" go away from your life. This industry is driven solely by demand and there are highly-developed countries where it d…
The good thing is that we were able to keep her in own home and get her on medicaid. She had exhausted all of her funds already. Medicaid pays for a nurse to check on her weekly. Medicaid also pays for "attendant services" to remind her to take her medication, get in and out of the shower, and keep the house presentable. A charity and my wife brings prepared meals that the attendant heats up. My MIL is a handful. She is abusive to everyone, screaming/shouting/argumentative non-stop, and quickly forgets what she just said.
We know one day, we will have to send her to a nursing home where they will likely sedate her with meds. We are trying to keep her in own home. And she argues about that as well. We actually had a one month argument where she demanded to be sent to a nursing home. When we told her that the one she named was cited for abusing patients, she kept arguing.
My grandmother recently transferred to a small, independent facility. For $10k a month she lives in a small house with a live-in caretaker and only two other patients. It's much more comfortable for her than the retirement community, but nobody can figure out why it's still so expensive. The costs involved are mind-boggling. You'd think that $100k+ a year should basically buy you personal round-the-clock care in your…
I don't want to be judgmental because I know these are extremely difficult situations with no easy answers, but what strikes me about this article is that the author blames the profit motive after what can be uncharitably viewed as taking an elderly parent and paying a third party to make the "problem" go away from your life. This industry is driven solely by demand and there are highly-developed countries where it d…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Aye. I feel like I have it bad in my situation with one elderly parent... I have a coworker with both his elderly parents and his wife's elderly parents. All four of them are deteriorating rapidly and need constant care and hospital visits. On top of that he has two sick, aging dogs. We commiserate about the multiple full-time jobs that we have, but seriously he has it unfathomably worse than I do. I'm stressed to my…
I think this goes back to cultural expectations to some extent. In some cultures the response to that is, "Your parents probably had full-time jobs and then they raised you on top of it, and part of the cycle of life is 'paying that back' when they're old and sick." Granted smaller and more diffuse family units make that harder, but part of it is just the lack of a sense of filial debt to the people who bore and rais…
We got both of my grandparents into a care home, with my grandmother having advanced dementia, and my grandfather a brain injury he got after a fall while going through hip-replacement rehab. Prior to that, my aunt, uncle, and rest of the family had been more or less 100% caretakers for them. Nurses would come by 2-3 times a day to give them medicine. But even as the dementia (of my grandmother) progressed, the care…
I guess maybe that doesn't account for profits being made by any contractors providing medicines, food, etc, which maybe could be done more cheaply without the profit motive. But 10% just doesn't scream "evil nursing home executives getting fat off of the elderly" to me.
It's a labor-intensive and difficult service to provide. The article's suggestion to professionalize care work seems right, but will increase costs. The two areas of dissatisfaction (high cost and poor quality) seem fundamentally at odds to me, are there proposals which would address them both?