“We’re on the threshold of the first-ever mass geriatric society,” says Dr. Leon Kass, chairman of the President’s Council on Bioethics from 2002 to 2005. “The bad news is that the price that many people are going to be paying for [an] extra decade of healthy longevity is up to another decade of anything but healthy longevity. … We’ve not yet begun to face up to what this means in human terms.”
First of all, “nursing home insurance” in and of itself doesn’t really exist as an insurance option. Similar to the notion of assisted living insurance, long term care insurance is the actual offering that will help manage costs of both. But we digress…
The above quote was taken from a very interesting documentary, “Living Old” by Frontline. It delves into something my own parents are dealing with on a daily basis:
For millions of Americans, living longer means coping with multiple chronic illnesses, increasing frailty and prolonged periods of dementia, which may last for years and sometimes even decades. Only one in 20 people over the age of 85 is still fully mobile, and roughly half will develop some form of dementia. “Everything started to go at 82 years,” says Rose Chanes, now 96 and in assisted living. “I don’t hear, I don’t see. … You’ve got to be crazy to call it a blessing to live like this. … I call it a curse.”
Of course, this also means that parents & siblings, even close friends, may (or most likely will) have to, in some way shape or form, manage these issues. I know for a fact that my own parents, who are now visiting their respective mothers – 96 & 93 – on an almost daily basis, would never have guessed this is what they would be spending most of their retired years doing.
As the nation ages, many believe that our health care system, with its focus on treatment and cure, is woefully ill-equipped to handle the new realities of long-term care. “Nobody’s bothered to think about what the repercussions are of trying to keep people alive longer and longer,” says Dr. David Muller, dean of medical education at Mount Sinai School of Medicine and co-founder of Visiting Doctors, a program that provides primary care to homebound elderly in New York City. “[It's] another bypass surgery, another transplant, … without anyone worrying about ‘Well, what’s next?’”
Not only are there going to be huge strains on our medical care system, but the costs associated with it – to the families and the nation as a whole – are going to be massive. Even with long term care insurance, which covers over half of her stay at an assisted-living facility on the east coast, my grandmothers cost over $2000 per month.
This all begs the question, what should we do?
With families smaller and more dispersed than ever before, and more doctors choosing medical specialties over family medicine, many fear that the country is on the brink of a national crisis in care. “One out of five people are going to be older adults,” says Dr. Jeffrey Farber, a geriatrician at Mount Sinai, “and there’s not really anyone trained to care for them.”
You can watch the entire “Living Old” documentary HERE
Related posts:
