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Sunday, July 22, 2007Any decline in elderly disability rates due to advances in medical care will be outweighed by the number of aging baby boomers and accelerating health care costs. Indeed, the CBO projects that long-term care expenditures for the elderly will quadruple by 2050. If private long-term care insurance coverage remains limited, the welfare of the elderly will decline, as could the wealth of their adult children, due to onerous out-of-pocket spending on long-term care. Medicaid spending on long-term care will have to rise, putting enormous strain on government budgets, and the existing infrastructure, already suffering from low standards--16% of nursing homes have serious deficiencies in quality, according to a 2005 Government Accountability Office report--may deteriorate further. Nursing homes, like most healthcare providers, find it difficult to survive on Medicaid payments: Nursing homes, in which Medicaid funds care for 66% of the patients, lose an average of $13 per Medicaid patient per day, according to a Lewin Group analysis. Long-term care insurance isn't a bad idea. Either that, or pray your kids can take care of you in your old age. posted by Sydney on 7/22/2007 07:03:00 PM 3 comments 3 Comments:
Great points. Fortunately, one of the best ways to avoid the pending crisis is through the establishingment of Long Term Care Partnership programs. When states establish an LTC Partnership program they encourage their citizens to own LTC Partnership policies.
By Or you could emigrate to one of the top 25 countries for health outcomes and access their publically funded systems...
By Someone has to foot the bill, the more elderly people you have with high healthcare needs who are not paying into the system, the more stress is placed upon the system. Because ultimately it is the people who are currently working who have to support those who are not. Money tends to hide this, but the bottom line is it is a person in a nursing home handing out those pills and turning those patients. Japan is facing much the same problems we are today.
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