Frail seniors, as well as adults with disabilities, often need help with routine medical care such as taking pills, receiving injections, getting oxygen, or managing catheters. Traditionally, this assistance has been provided only by nurses. But, especially for people living at home or even in assisted living facilities, having a nurse provide this routine care is prohibitively expensive and can lead to long delays in [...]
The quality of care for the frail elderly and adults with disabilities and the assistance available for their family caregivers varies widely among the states. Now, for the first time, researchers at AARP have tried to measure where you can get the highest quality care. And the differences among the states are even more dramatic than I thought. A handful, including Minnesota, [...]
My dad, who had congestive heart failure, lived on the second floor of a garden apartment building that had no elevator. As the disease made him weaker, he could no long walk down the stairs. And for the last year of his life, he was trapped in his own apartment. An "outing" was a slow walk, and eventually, a wheelchair ride about 100 feet to the [...]
Elder abuse is hard to define, and it is a challenge to know how widespread it is. But it is a deeply serious problem and I recently came across two elder abuse stories worth passing on. If you are an elder care professional or an adult child caring for parents, read them carefully. And beware. The first is courtesy of Steve Goldberg, a Washington, D.C. investment adviser and contributing [...]
There may be no more controversial issue for both Baby Boomers and their parents than Social Security. After AARP officials said last week the organization would be open to discussing changes in the system, I wrote the following for my TaxVox blog: Social Security has two obvious problems. While the system is not “broke,” as some insist, it will have only enough [...]
We Americans often fall into the trap of looking at our problems in isolation. But every nation in the world faces its own challenges when it comes to caring for the elderly and younger people with disabilities. An imporant new report from the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) provides an important international context for caregiving and caregivers in the developed [...]
Money Follows the Person is a cornerstone of the federal government's effort to move Medicaid beneficiaries from nursing homes into the community. But a new study commissioned by Medicaid itself shows how difficult those transitions can be. In the 30 states that have been testing the program over the past three years, only 8,500 people have used MFP to return to their communities. That's [...]
President Obama's 2012 budget is the latest indication of the growing pressures government-provided aging services will face in coming years. And as tight as his budget is, spending on assistance for poor and frail seniors is likely to end up much lower than Obama proposed. With congressional Republicans vowing to cut $100 billion from domestic spending over the remaining seven [...]
It is an article of faith among many in the elder and disability advocacy communities that aging in place is always the best alternative for someone who needs personal care. I don't believe it, and I recently heard an important panel discussion that confirmed that view. The panel, sponsored by Washington Grantmakers, was especially interesting because the participants were all supporters of [...]
The Stanford University Center on Longevity has just released a trove of information on the health, living arrangements, and demographics of an aging America. The study, "New Realities of an Older America" tells the story of an independent, remarkably healthy population, but one that will present unique challenges as it lives well into its 80s and, eventually, reaches frail old age. For example, authors Adele Hayutin, [...]