Reply #43: My grandma is in a nursing home

[exboyfil]

and there is no way that even a single willing family member could deal with her. She is in a wheelchair and is a complete dead weight in any sort of manipulation. She weighs over 140#. They use special machines in the nursing home for her to go to the restroom (a portable potty) and into and out of bed, or into her recliner. She cannot control her bladder functions. She takes a cocktail of over 10 drugs that have to be managed daily. She can barely feed herself and needs frequent help in that area. She has frequent health problems in addition to the regular drugs (skin infections, bladder infections, etc). She can barely see and can no longer read.

She is on Medicare/Medicaid, and she is the single biggest reason that I am no longer a libertarian. About 2 1/2 years ago my aunt became unable to take care of her, and my mom basically hauled her to my state in antipication of me getting her into a nursing home. She then went back to her home, and she and my uncle visit about once or twice a year. I was fortunate that a spot was open in a local nursing home. I am not sure what would have happened otherwise. Even if an individual was available to take care of her at home, a single person could not do it.

I look at this from a societal perspective, and I really wonder how sustainable the situation is for the future. My grandmother is on the front end of a huge bubble of people who will require this care in the future. Our current Medicare/Medicaid laws only require poverty to access the system (which is not a problem for my grandmother since she has always been poor). The full cost for the nursing home is about $6,000/mo., and I can believe that the actual cost to maintain my grandmother is probably in the $3,000/mo. range when you consider all that needs to happen. That would represent most of my take home pay if I had to pay it (my grandmother pays about $1,300/mo. through her two pensions). The rest is covered by Medicare/Medicaid in a Byzantine structure that I cannot even begin to understand.


Medical reform - I am all for it.