Sorry, but I didn't want to hijack someone else's thread so I decided to start my own. If Medicare had to pay for long term nursing care for the elderly, the fund would be bankrupt within in a very short time. Long term nursing care is very expensive.

This is not what medicare was designed for. Also, I find it hard to believe that the government is not paying for any Alzheimer's research, for a disease that threatens most retirees and their families should they live long enough. I read an article the other day which stated that 1 of 5 people who reached age 90 had no cognitive disabilities, which says to me that 4 out of 5 do have some form of cognitive disabilities. This is the subject that Americans and our politicians needs to be talking about. Thanks to Sarah Palin back in 2008, she made it almost impossible to talk about, but that doesn't mean that we shouldn't be talking about it and what i'm talking about is Sarah Palin's death panels. Nursing homes when you aren't dealing with a demented patient are incredibly expensive. When you add dementia to the mix, it's that much more expensive.

I am dealing with two parents one 85 and one 84, who both have recently come down in the past year with early stages of dementia. My dad's came on with gangbusters and his cognitive skill are diminishing quickly. You wouldn't believe that he was still driving as recently as last September and living alone as recent as 4 months ago. The problem is that his body is still relatively healthy, thanks to a host of pills he takes to control a host of ailments common with old age, but he's becoming less and less cooperative each day, and more and more defiant with those trying to assist him. My mother is in the early throws of dementia and still relatively healthy, and could live another decade. But because she lived alone, some of my siblings sought a temporary conservativeship over her because they thought she was making poor choices which could threaten her finances, (i.e. buying things she didn't need from door to door salesmen.) The problem is that the one with dementia is usually the last to know it. Our parents lived in separate households which only makes the problem worse. Their children up until recently have had to split their non working time going between their two residences. Few people could afford 24 hour in home care of some sort or for an assisted living facility with a dementia ward. I could buy a condo on a beach and the payments would be less than it would cost for a month in a shared room in an assisted living facility with a dementia ward. I don't think Medicare should have to pay these types of bills. The system was not set up for this type of thing and the system would be bankrupt in no time.

People who would have normally died of natural causes a decade earlier due to heart attacks or stroke or other diseases can now live decades longer thanks to medication and other medical devices that keep our hearts pumping but no one has yet to find a cure to keep brain cells from dying resulting in a continual degradation of our cognitive skills. When I reach that point and perhaps before I reach that point, I want to be able to die with dignity. My siblings and I have investigated various types of faciiities over the past 9 months checking out what options are out there for the cognitive impaired and what it costs, and what the quality of life appears to be at these types of facilities and I've personally have arrived at a few conclusions for me. I don't want to go to Adult Day Care or be put in a nursing care facility because my working adult children who have not reached retirement age, can't supervise me 24/7. I also would rather pass on to my children any resources I have remaining when I can no longer function on my own, or tend to my own needs, rather than spend my final days or what could be years being medicated in some smelly nursing facility with a bunch of other demented patients. Our body parts were not designed to last forever, but modern devices can keep our heart ticking long past what Mother Nature intended.

I'm thankful for the photos shared here and for the many who made the trip to support her. Thank you all. I then spent more time than I should have, sifting through the anti-Hillary posts, since you can't miss them. They're everywhere.

Hillary could have been anything she wanted to be. No one can deny that the woman is incredibly smart, insightful, and yes ambitious. But so what. If she had a pair of balls, she would have been president a long time ago. But there has always been this double standard for women; so the best she could do before now, is to be the woman behind the man. We know the media is going to spend the dog days of summer talking about the Clinton’s wealth and conducting bullshit polls about whether American’s think Hillary is honest or not, but if the media was truly honest they would take a poll about what the country thinks about the honesty of every candidate running for president, or any office for that matter and I’m sure the results would show that Hillary is in good company. And if all the Clinton’s were interested in was wealth, they could have had that decades ago and spared themselves and this nation a ton of grief.

For those of you who don’t like her, and have no plans to vote for her, that’s your business. But be honest about it. It takes a hell of a lot of guts to put yourself out there as a candidate. Much more than it takes to sling mud via a keyboard. If Elizabeth Warren wanted to run for president she could have, but she didn’t. If Bernie has a loyal fan base out there who CAN get him to the White House, so be it. Time will tell. But stop opining about what could have been, and what ifs. Running for president is not easy. Hillary’s been down this road before, and she knows that it’s not going to be easy, especially with what she’s already had to put up with in the past three decades with all the bullshit investigations woven out of whole cloth. I’m always amazed at how the Democratic party members like to eat their own, particularly when there is a whole host of GOP members who are waiting, ready and willing to do their bidding for them. No I don’t have thousands of posts here on this website like some here, but than I’ve got a job and a family and didn’t have time to rack up thousands of posts over the past, but I’ve always kept myself politically informed and voted, and my husband has worked on both national and local democratic campaigns in the past few years since he was been retired.

The GOP has a host of billionaires ready to finance their puppet candidates who will do their bidding to continue stacking the deck of the Supreme Court, suppress voter’s rights, try and repeal the ACA, continue fighting the last war with other people children’s boots on the ground, ship your jobs overseas, overturn environmental protections, further reduce taxation on the top earners, etc, etc, etc. The Democratic Party needs a candidate who can win. If that candidate is Bernie Sanders, time will tell. In the meantime, ask yourself what YOU have done lately to further the Democratic cause. If the only thing has been to sit at your keyboard and bash those who’ve thrown their hat in the ring, than heaven help us all. I plan to retire at the end of the year, just in time to work on Hillary’s campaign. If Hillary’s no longer a candidate, I’ll campaign for whomever the Democratic candidate is, because never before have the principles of the two major parties been so stark in contrast.