Yes, it's a worry...

 

Yahoo News warns that the cost of care for the elderly is beyond many people's reach.

A wave of Americans has been reaching retirement age largely unprepared for the extraordinary costs of specialized care. These aging baby boomers - 73 million strong, the oldest of whom turn 77 this year - pose an unprecedented challenge to the U.S. economy, as individual families shoulder an increasingly ruinous financial burden with little help from stalemated policymakers in Washington.

The dilemma is particularly vexing for those in the economic middle. They can't afford the high costs of care on their own, yet their resources are too high for them to qualify for federal safety-net insurance. An estimated 18 million middle-income boomers will require care for moderate to severe needs but be unable to pay for it, according to an analysis of the gap by the Center for Retirement Research at Boston College.

"It's this really enormous financial bomb sitting out there that most people are just hoping won't hit them," said Marc A. Cohen, co-director of the LeadingAge LTSS Center at the University of Massachusetts at Boston. "There's an incredible amount of confusion and denial."

. . .

Polls show the vast majority of people would prefer aging in place, in their own home. But median costs for 40 hours a week of assistance from a care aide in the home, for things like bathing, dressing, eating and toileting, run over $56,000 a year. A shortage of home care aides, moreover, was exacerbated by the pandemic.

Nursing homes provide the most intensive care for the most dependent seniors and function like medical facilities, averaging $120,000 a year unless you qualify for Medicaid, the federal insurance program for the poor and elderly. Medicaid will kick in only once an elderly person's resources are drained away.

There's much more at the link, including several examples.

This is a very serious concern for many older Americans, including yours truly.  I'm not yet in need of such care, but I almost certainly will one day - and I have no way at all to pay for it.  The only option would be to sell almost everything my wife and I possess, including our home, and spend that on care, in the hope that we'd then qualify for Medicaid (assuming, of course, that Medicaid still exists by then, and the country hasn't gone bankrupt).  Needless to say, I don't plan on doing that . . . but the only alternative is to live at home and hope I can cope.

I think there's a place here for small communities of like-minded people to help each other.  We've already spoken about such "tribes" or "clans" in terms of mutual self-defense against urban crime and violence, or helping each other in difficult economic times.  Another reason for forming such groups is to have its members help each other with senior care, as far as possible.  I think there are good reasons to pursue such options, provided enough people living close together are willing to help.  Churches, the American Legion and other social groups might be an option to help organize them.

What do you think, readers?  For the older among us, how do you plan to deal with this issue when it arises?  Do you have a solution, or is it going to be a case of taking one day at a time and coping as best we can?  Let us know in Comments, so we can get a better idea of our overall preparedness for a need that's certain to confront us all, sooner or later.

It's strange to think that modern medicine, with all its blessings, has in fact largely caused this conundrum.  We're living so much longer than our forefathers, and our illnesses and infirmities are much more "treatable" than they were;  so there are more older people in need of such care.  If we died at the "regular" time, of natural causes that until recently were taken for granted at the end of life, the problem probably wouldn't exist.  It largely doesn't in the Third World, of course, because those natural causes still kill older people in the absence of advanced medical treatment.

Peter