The Senior Care Problem

If you are not convinced that senior care is a growing problem here are some more statistics. These are also borrow from another site, but help to show the concerns of people who wind up responsible for the care of of a senior. The issue is both time and money though these statistics focus mostly on the financial aspects of senior care:

• After age 65 your chances of entering a nursing home are about 50/50, or 1 in 2
• If you’re diagnosed as a “custodial care” patient, meaning your condition has stabilized and you’re not getting any better, Medicare will not pay for your care
• The average cost of a nursing home in California in 2004 is $170/day, or just over $5,000/month. That’s $60,000/year!!
• Seniors have an average of $20,000 in savings – this is why 90% of the families who aren’t prepared for long term care go broke in about 4 months
• The average length of time spent in a nursing home is 30 months or 2½ years. A little simple math tells you that the total cost will be $150,000; ($60K/year X 2.5 years = $150K).
• Worse, the nursing home costs have been increasing at a rate of about 7% per year since 1998, which means that in just 10 years you’ll pay $10,000/month, and in 2030 the cost will be over $15,000/month! NO ONE has $150,000 now to spend on long term care, and you certainly won’t have a whopping $540,000 in 2030!! ($15K/month X 30 months = $540K)
• We know the costs will continue to increase, but how long you live, or your average life expectancy, affects the total cost as well. If you’re a man your average life expectancy is 78 years – If you’re a woman you’ll live a little longer on average, about 80 years. But due to medical advances and new genetic technologies, these numbers are increasing!! Now that’s GREAT news as long as you’re healthy – It becomes really bad news if you’re in a nursing home. The longer you’re there, the more you’ll have to pay.
• Even if your family has 2, 3 or 4 times more money tucked away than the average family does, about $20,000, it’s obvious that you still won’t be able to pay all the costs. You’ll end up broke, with a State lien on your home, and nothing left as an inheritance for your children and heirs.
• Anyone who has experienced a long term care incident directly or indirectly will tell you they wish someone had warned them about long term care so they could have done something to protect themselves.

This is a good, though dire, description targeted at people who don't want to become dependent senior citizens in the future. What about the people who are already helping to care for a senior? You already know how much senior care costs and how much of your time it takes. Maybe you are looking in to a nursing home (the worst case option for senior housing) or assisted living or a retirement community. Either way the financial burden of senior care is daunting. Typically, as the above describes, the senior themselves really doesn't have much put away for this. That means that you can potentially watch or even help you inheritance disappear. Or even worse you can find yourself in a situation where the senior you care for needs resources that they can't afford, again assisted living, senior housing, or a nursing home, and they can't pay for it so you wind up paying out of your own pocket. After all, you care for them how can you let them not get the services they need?

So what can you do? The first thing is to start with an understanding about how much of the senior's care you are going to be responsible for. Are you going to be an advisor, provide assistance, be the sole care giver, etc. Getting this clear up front makes a lot of the decisions easier. The second is to find out what the right living arrangement for them is. There is a big difference both in cost and level of care between letting the senior stay in their home with some home care or home health care or moving to a retirement community, senior housing, assisted living, or nursing home. Choosing the right living/housing option for a senior is the most important thing to get right. Then you need to be flexible as the circumstances can and will change as the senior ages. Maybe living at home with care visits works for a while bu then they need to move to assisted living.

There are also financial, insurance and other decisions that need to be made and then reviewed regularly. The goal here is to review all of these issues as they apply to senior care and provide guidance and resources (for example: senior care resources in New Hampshire) . As I always say, senior care can be very rewarding if done right.