Growing Older

Washington Monthly | The Strange Political Silence On Elder Care

Washington Monthly | The Strange Political Silence On Elder Care

Most people assume that Medicare will cover the type of long-term personal care older people often need; it does not. Neither does standard private health insurance. And the average Social Security check can only make a medium-sized dent in the cost of this care, which can easily exceed $100,000 a year if provided in a nursing home. Medicaid, unlike Medicare, does cover long-term care, but only for patients who have exhausted their savings, and coverage, which varies from state to state, can be extremely limited. So the safety net you thought would catch you in old age is less like a net and more like a staircase you get pushed down, bumping along until you’ve impoverished yourself enough to hit Medicaid at the bottom.

The safety net you thought would catch you in old age is less like a net and more like a staircase you get pushed down, bumping along until you’ve impoverished yourself enough to hit Medicaid at the bottom. Private long-term care insurance exists, but it’s the designer bikini of insurance: too expensive, skimpy coverage. Since people tend to buy it only when they know they’ll soon be making a claim, there are never enough healthy people paying into the plans to keep them affordable. Insurance companies have realized this and jacked up premiums—or stopped selling policies altogether. Meanwhile, the cost of hiring a home health aide to take care of a frail parent can add up to $50,000 or more per year. So tens of millions of individual women across the United States wind up providing the care themselves for free, and bearing its cost in the form of stress, lost wages, and lost opportunities to nourish their other needs, and their families’. When we talked on the phone, Baden-Mayer wondered aloud, “Why is it that we don’t have a good system that we can plug into when our parents need care?”

The pain of getting old

On of the parts of getting to older – well middle aged – is the aches and pains that sometimes come along with life. While by no means am I super physically fit – never been so – I do spend a lot of time outdoors and when I’m in town I walk a lot from place to place. But sometimes I feel stiff and sore — like I have the past few days.

Maybe it’s part of mid age life or pushing myself hard as I recently did hiking. Maybe it’s a sign of Lyme disease that struck up unbeknownst to me. Certainly a lot of people I know have Lyme disease. I don’t know. Only time will tell. I don’t t have any Lyme rashes, but I’ve have had headaches and minor aches on and off.

The Future is Unpredictable.

It’s easy for me to feel daunted and unsure at times about my hope to eventually own land, and an off-grid home out in the country at some point in the future. Each week, I invest and save a little more, but it’s still a distant future, with many questions, difficulties and unknowns, but I’m not that worried.

Nothing that I am investing in, really ties me to any one path going forward. Money, not tided up in anything but financial assets is entirely fungible, I am free to move it from one purpose to another. Maybe when I get older, I will want an ordinary house in suburbs, or I’ll decide to be an urbanite and live my final years in the city. Or maybe, rather then living off-grid, I’ll do something with agriculture. But it really doesn’t matter — savings can be used for any purpose.

My job, my family and in many ways my fear of the unknown keep me in New York State for now. But forever, that I do not know. I’m interested in many other states. But things can and do change. Markets go up and down, policies change, new job opportunities present themselves. Even renewable energy and electronics are rapidly changing, the off-grid technologies of today are likely to be different in a decade.

So who knows where I will be in a decade from now … much less 20 years from now.

Why I Hope to Die at 75

Why I Hope to Die at 75

"But here is a simple truth that many of us seem to resist: living too long is also a loss. It renders many of us, if not disabled, then faltering and declining, a state that may not be worse than death but is nonetheless deprived. It robs us of our creativity and ability to contribute to work, society, the world. It transforms how people experience us, relate to us, and, most important, remember us. We are no longer remembered as vibrant and engaged but as feeble, ineffectual, even pathetic."