My mom has been in assisted living for a few years and doing reasonably well. After a recent fall, she has not been able to get back to the stable transfers required by assisted living and will stay in long term care at the nursing home. We are lucky it is a great facility and she is very happy with the staff. I knew it would be expensive than AL but it’s still a shock. $13,000/month versus the $8,500 she was paying before. It’s worth it to keep her comfortable and safe and have her needs met without the stress of having to maintain a certain level of function in AL. And I am thankful she can transition to Medicaid when her nest egg runs out. It’s much easier to get a bed there when you still have funds to pay, so I’m glad she is in a stable situation. It would be much more challenging if my dad was still alive and needed that money to fund living independently. He was always in great health and very active until his cancer diagnosis. Just reflecting on how sad it is that without a solid nest egg, the last few weeks would have been so much harder for her. She was able to private pay for a month of skilled nursing rehab because she did not qualify through insurance, while also paying for her room in AL. Without that money, she would have been discharged with home health care at her AL which would have been very insufficient and risky. She was bed bound for a week and can now transfer to her wheelchair with maximum support. Unless you have money to private pay, all the Medicaid beds are full, and the only options are the 2 and 3 star facilities. My husband and I are trying hard to save for my own retirement to avoid burdening our own kids, but we won’t be in as good as shape as my mom, despite having 2 incomes. And we won’t have the cushion of inheritance that are own parents had - there will be nothing left, and that’s okay, our parents money belongs to them and should fund their care, but it’s still daunting to try to prepare financially for our own healthcare. I’m trying hard to take care of my own health so that I won’t need the same level of care, but we all know not every outcome is under our control.
The price of assisted living is skyrocketing.
I started using AI to find ways to lower costs for people.
I'd love to get community feedback on: assistedly.ai
It's starting in Massachusetts.
What do you like? What should be changed?
I'd love to know when it helps.
Due to the advances of modern medicine during the 20th century and since, doctors learned to keep people alive longer, but those extra 10 - 20 years are not necessarily healthy ones. Over 100 years ago people died before they suffered the diseases of old age we are seeing so prevalent now, or they died fairly quickly once disease set in.
And, yes, we can take care of ourselves by trying to live a better lifestyle, but some things are beyond our control. And now, aging Boomers are overwhelming our healthcare system. We're learning now how to manage and resolve these social problems. In 20 or 30 years, it will probably look much better - for our children. My husband and I are the youngest of the Boomers, so I don't know what the next 20 years of healthcare is going to look like for us. I will just take it as it comes, and hope that I have a way to opt out of treatment and die quickly from any disease that ails me. And hope that nursing homes will be available to me for care when needed.
But recently I had a breakthrough. It was : of course I don't want to live in AL because I am too young and would be bored to tears. But maybe when I am in my 80s like my mom and surrounded by other people the same age as I am, it won't seem so bad.
He is now in a facility in our small town. Would have been the last place I would have wanted. Old building, food not great, but the care is much, much better. Not perfect, but better than the expensive place. It's less than 1/2 the cost of the other facility and it's much closer to me so I can go most days to visit & check on things.
Look up the 2 and 3 star places sometimes its just paper work that lost them a star or 2. Don't judge a book by its cover its the people that care for your mom not how pretty they look. The ones that look pretty aren't always the best. They just haven't got caught. And when they lose a star its usually cause a patient got hurt really bad. Look them up please. I had to rehab my mom and it was a 2 star no joke. I will tell you it was the best "care" she ever got. Just saying do your research you will be surprised what you find.
We see our grocery costs go up quite a bit, imagine what the grocery costs would be for a nursing home/senior facility. Electricity/gas is also more than what we are use to, again imagine the bill for the nursing/senior facility. Landscaping/snow plowing cost are higher due to cost of gasoline.
Now we have "legal" immigrants afraid to come to work, and others resigning from their jobs out of fear. There is now a major work shortage for nursing/senior facilities. Both my parents had wonderful, warm, loving, aides that helped them in their final years, people from around the world. These workers all paid into social security and Medicare but will never be able to use it later in life unless things change where they are allowed back with work visas and eventually become US Citizens (which can take up to 6-10 yrs).
My husband and I saved diligently for our retirement and did not live lavish lifestyles yet we are still worried about having enough to pay for our care, especially is we live as long as our parents (his Mom, 90, my Mom 97 and still living in the house next to mine).
A lot of the cost is driven by the labor shortage which is not going to go away any time soon due to an oversized Boomer demographic and the much smaller consecutive generation populations. Also, the US's replacement birthrate is below 2.1 children which means our younger generations will continue to shrink. We're not as bad as other countries and young people still want to emigrate here and this is a GOOD thing! Our government needs to fix the *legal* immigration backlog so young people can come here, work in jobs that others don't want, and pay taxes while living the American Dream.