Retirement News : Seniors : The Specter of Long-Term Care

The Specter of Long-Term Care

Date Added: 09-11-2005

Long-term care - a prison for those who can't afford it.  Read the excerpt below.

Motley Fool - USA

By David Braze (TMF Pixy)
November 8, 2005

This article is the first of a six-part series on long-term care.

A little more than 10 years ago, my mother, then aged 84 and living alone, took a tumble down the stairs of her home. Unfortunately, she failed to recover from that fall and was no longer able to care for herself. She required comprehensive personal services that had to be provided by someone else. Thus began my sudden and scary introduction to the murky world of long-term care. Unwilling to relocate to my home, Mom elected to move to a local nursing home where she died not quite three years later. Had she lived, she could have afforded just one more year of that stay before her assets would have been totally exhausted.

A few years later, my 90-year-old father took a fall that broke his hip -- an injury from which he, too, could not recover. Worse, he was already providing care to my invalid stepmother. Neither was willing to relocate, whether to my home or to a nursing home. They elected to hire live-in caregivers. My stepmother died about one year later, and my father a year after her passing. In the interim, Dad had suffered two mini-strokes that rendered him unable to speak and further contributed to his immobility. While he spent some $200,000 for the long-term care he and my stepmom received in their home, at death he still had sufficient assets for another eight years of those services.

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http://www.fool.com/news/commentary/2005/commentary05110806.htm