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Adult Day Cares in the Rio Grande Valley

texasobserver.org

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Re: Adult Day Cares in the Rio Grande Valley

#41

Post by Consultant32452 »

DoreenMichele wrote: post #27
Consultant32452 wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Whether or not it creates worse future problems depends primarily on whether or not it creates net tax revenue. So the new immigrants pay taxes, that helps. But presumably this new elder care is going to be funded in part or in whole by an increase in taxes.

Your argument comes across to me like "Let's not do a thing I agree would be short-term useful and helpful because it's all bad news, all the time." It sound super pessimistic. Long experience suggests to me that fixing what can be fixed today makes tomorrow better. What a lot of people scoff at as bandaid solutions are very often perfectly good solutions. Bandaids need to changed regularly while the wound heals. You…

I think we have very deep problem in our culture where so many systems are built on unsustainable exponential growth. It encompasses everything from our elder pension/healthcare system to tenure at the universities. Huge cultural, social, and economic changes are going to be necessary and it's not going to be pretty. Eric Weinstein calls this phenomenon EGOs, or embedded growth obligations.

Re: Adult Day Cares in the Rio Grande Valley

#42

Post by DoreenMichele »

Consultant32452 wrote: post #41
DoreenMichele wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your argument comes across to me like "Let's not do a thing I agree would be short-term useful and helpful because it's all bad news, all the time." It sound super pessimistic. Long experience suggests to me that fixing what can be fixed today makes tomorrow better. What a lot of people scoff at as bandaid solutions are very often perfectly good solutions. Bandaids need to changed regularly while the wound heals. You…

I think we have very deep problem in our culture where so many systems are built on unsustainable exponential growth. It encompasses everything from our elder pension/healthcare system to tenure at the universities. Huge cultural, social, and economic changes are going to be necessary and it's not going to be pretty. Eric Weinstein calls this phenomenon EGOs, or embedded growth obligations.

On the good news front, one of the current trends in elderly care is an increased reliance on tech to help elderly individuals maintain their independence. They are increasingly using alarms, text messaging notifications and similar to help them take their medication without a person supervising that in person and to notify a relative if they fall and fail to get back up and similar.

Technology is helping to address the issue in a way which reduces the need younger labor to care for an aging population while simultaneously improving quality of life for the elderly. Win/Win.

Re: Adult Day Cares in the Rio Grande Valley

#43

Post by jules »

DoreenMichele wrote: post #24
Consultant32452 wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm pro immigrant, but this doesn't solve the problem. At best it postpones it slightly because as soon as those immigrants become a little more prosperous they stop having so many kids too.

If you "postpone" it often enough, that's basically the same as fixing it. Postpone means "fixing it for now, but not for all time." Fix it for now, then let tomorrow figure out how to postpone it again. That's only a problem if postponing it involves incurring worse future problems.

Exponential population growth is hard to keep going indefinitely.

Re: Adult Day Cares in the Rio Grande Valley

#44

Post by missosoup »

Consultant32452 wrote: post #16
jen_h wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I really hope so. There's a huge need for a sea change in eldercare. My spouse and I have spent at least three months of this year helping older relatives, and I worry it'll consume a bigger chunk of next year. One interesting bright light is that a lot of the startups targeted towards younger people are actually godsends for senior independence -- grocery delivery, meal delivery, ridesharing. Not to mention how much…

I believe this is an unsolvable problem. The math just doesn't work anymore. Back when exponential population growth was more of an option you'd just have 6 kids to spread the cost of elder care across. It doesn't matter whether you care for your parents or hire someone to, the fact of the matter is there is increasingly just not enough young people to provide the elder care and also perform the other kinds of produc…

I agree that it's an unsolvable problem. It's also largely cultural. I don't think it has to do with unconstrained exponential growth.

Visit any poor regions of the world and you'll find there's a lot more emphasis on taking care of the elders regardless of the median number of children per family.

For a variety of reasons, that kind of culture gets wiped out in developed nations, to the detriment of everyone. Outsourcing it out of the family and building a capitalist industry around it is super dystonian yet here we are.

Re: Adult Day Cares in the Rio Grande Valley

#45

Post by telesilla »

I have family members who work for similar groups in another country - they pick up the seniors in a van every morning and have activities at a comfortable base location that emulates a sitting room. It's a non-profit supported by the community, knowing that mental health leads to better physical health: ultimately leading to lower hospitalisation rates, catching problems early due to good communication, and therefore lower costs. It's extremely beneficial for all involved, and the women who run it tend to be older themselves nearing retirement age, as it's undemanding work for those who don't have much education or were "home makers" (being an older generation of women).

Re: Adult Day Cares in the Rio Grande Valley

#46

Post by watwut »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #33
throwaway010718 wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well if you casually observed the last two generations of my Hispanic family, you would say we made it work too. But that is because the culture pushes the youngest daughters to not get married and have no children. So now we have multiple women in our family who are bitter, boring, poor, and have destroyed their careers prospects because "it works" for the rest of the family.

Would those career prospects be substantially different if those women chose to have children? Or if they chose to postpone their careers to care for aging parents when the time came? Maybe their career goes well but to remain in it becomes a financial hardship so care can be paid for while they still work. Hard to say, lots of variables.

Their prospect would be around similar to prospects of older daughters or sons. Who are not bitter, poor and boring.

They would not be in loose loose "we blame you for not choosing this and then blame you for consequences of choosing this" situation.

Re: Adult Day Cares in the Rio Grande Valley

#47

Post by thbr99 »

pram wrote: post #4
thbr99 wrote: post #3

I am very interested to see how many Latinos work here. At least here in Canada elderly care workers are mostly indentured Filipino workers whose immigration files are delayed by the Federal govt essentially making them indentured servants. It is appalling to see first world countries exploiting third world workers by indentured servitude to take care of their parents & elderly.

Uh, 'latinos' (a lot of people in this area prefer hispanic or tejano) make up the vast majority of the population in the RGV so, presumably quite a few.

I am sorry for my ignorance. I am a new citizen of this part of the world. Too late to edit it.

Re: Adult Day Cares in the Rio Grande Valley

#48

Post by Consultant32452 »

ng12 wrote: post #30
crooked-v wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe we should start letting in all those young immigrants from demographics who have lots of children who want to move to the US.

Or maybe we could provide a better social safety net and more incentive/assistance for having children.

I think people, in part, feel like they don't need to have as many kids because of the existing social safety nets. When times are extremely tough a big family isn't more mouths to feed, it's more workers/fighters/etc.

Re: Adult Day Cares in the Rio Grande Valley

#49

Post by jbob2000 »

FreedomToCreate wrote: post #2

https://acl.gov/sites/default/files/Aging%20and%20Disability... Over the next 20 years, the number of elderly over the age of 85 is projected to go from 6.4 to 14.6 million. 10% of the population is over 65. That's a lot of people who don't work and need care in the next 2 decades. We are probably going to see a big uptick in Y combinator graduating companies who focus on elderly care.

I disagree that we’ll see an uptick. The elderly care industry is very labour intensive. You can have software that, for example, makes it easier to track who the nurse should give medication to, but you still need a nurse to do it. You still need an orderly to clean their room when they crap on the floor. You still need 3 people to flip obese, bed-ridden grandpa on to his other side.

You can have software that alerts you about care, or tracks progress, or stores patient information, but those things were never the expensive part of elderly care. The expensive part is always going to be paying a person to do X because elderly person can’t do X.

Re: Adult Day Cares in the Rio Grande Valley

#50

Post by lonelappde »

Consultant32452 wrote: post #16
jen_h wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I really hope so. There's a huge need for a sea change in eldercare. My spouse and I have spent at least three months of this year helping older relatives, and I worry it'll consume a bigger chunk of next year. One interesting bright light is that a lot of the startups targeted towards younger people are actually godsends for senior independence -- grocery delivery, meal delivery, ridesharing. Not to mention how much…

I believe this is an unsolvable problem. The math just doesn't work anymore. Back when exponential population growth was more of an option you'd just have 6 kids to spread the cost of elder care across. It doesn't matter whether you care for your parents or hire someone to, the fact of the matter is there is increasingly just not enough young people to provide the elder care and also perform the other kinds of produc…

Society is 10x as productive as it was 30years ago. The number of people is irrelevant. Just need to spend more on elder care from the huge economic pie.
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