About 7.4% of Americans aged 75 and older lived in nursing homes in 2006, compared with 8.1% in 2000 and 10.2% in 1990.
"The upper-income white population has other options than nursing homes," says William Frey, demographer at the Brookings Institution. "They're moving to assisted living or their well-off, baby boomer children are taking care of them in other ways."
At-home care and assisted-living facilities have been a fast-growing segment of elder care in the past decade, says Elise Bolda, director of Community Partnerships for Older Adults, a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation program that helps communities develop long-term care and services for the elderly.
The new census data shows that nursing home residents are overwhelmingly female
(Female: 69.2%/Male: 30.8%). TheMedian age is 83.2 years and the per capita income of nursing home residents is $12,251.
To read the full article and get links to some excellent content on eldercare related issues go to http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/census/2007-09-27-nursing-homes_N.htm
In June, USA TODAY ran a five-day series on the millions of Americans caring for elderly parents and how they handle the murky worlds of medicine, law, hospitals, nursing homes, guilt, fear and family ties. Here's a summary of the contents. Click on the link above to get access to all of these articles.
• The burden of caring for elderly parents
• A shift away from nursing homes
• Valuable resources for caregivers
• Coping with an aging parent: The emotional toll
• Balancing work and caregiving
• Claiming your parent as a dependent
• Navigating sibling relationships
• Re-emergence of multigenerational households
• Avoiding scams that target your parents
• Long-term care insurance has its own risks
• When a parent has Alzheimer's or dementia
• Planning for retirement and elder care
• How to spend down assets to pay for care
Feel free to add your comments to this blog or contact me at bob@elderlifeplanning.com
1 comments:
The points made regarding the shift from moving into facilities to staying at home with professional or family caregivers is a definite trend, but one with some consequences that aren't touched upon in this posting. The well-off boomer children aren’t always so well-off. Oftentimes it is the adult daughters who end up as the primary caregiver; they may also have other major responsibilities which ends up putting them between the proverbial rock and a hard place—sometimes the strain is primarily financial, but other times it can be the result of having life turn into a juggling act of responsibilities (such as jobs, children).
In another posting you point out the horrendous acts of some LTCI carriers, which are unquestionable unconscionable. Luckily, as you point out, there are some decent LTCI carriers out there—and LTCI policies are changing to fit the market…but it is happening slowly. Many LTCI purchasers in the last decade bought policies as a worst case scenario (figuring that a skilled nursing facility was the worst case scenario). So the policy was in place should they need skilled 24-hour care, but not for any measures that might be needed before that happened. Now policies that cover in-home care and assisted living are readily available. Hopefully soon the LTCI industry will get rid of its underbelly and more Americans can live happy and healthily where they want for longer.
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