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https://acl.gov/sites/default/files/Aging%20and%20Disability%20in%20America/2017OlderAmericansProfile.pdf https://acl.gov/sites/default/files/Aging%20and%20Disa

https://acl.gov/sites/default/files/Aging%20and%20Disability%20in%20America/2017OlderAmericansProfile.pdf https://acl.gov/sites/default/files/Aging%20and%20Disability... Over the next 20 years, the number of elderly over the age of 85 is projected to go from 6.4 to 14.6 million. 10% of the population is over 65. That's a lot of people who don't work and need care in the next 2 decades. We are probably going to see a big uptick in Y combinator graduating companies who focus on elderly care.

jen_h 7y ago
I really hope so. There's a huge need for a sea change in eldercare. My spouse and I have spent at least three months of this year helping older relatives, and I worry it'll consume a bigger chunk of next year. One interesting bright light is that a lot of the startups targeted towards younger people are actually godsends for senior independence -- grocery delivery, meal delivery, ridesharing. Not to mention how much cheaper it is to order assistive devices -- the very same assistive devices for a quarter of the price -- online vs. the local medical device rental places.
- toomuchtodo 7y ago
  > My spouse and I have spent at least three months of this year helping older relatives, and I worry it'll consume a bigger chunk of next year. I’m curious about this mindset. Why would you worry about it consuming more time? Isn’t that what family is for?
  - jen_h 7y ago
    Most people want to be independent and to have their children and grandchildren to visit as guests, not full-time caregivers. We are very blessed that we're in the position to be able to easily pop from state to state helping and can work wherever we happen to be, but at the same time, they want to live their lives independently, too. Also, think about where caregivers might have to relocate and how they might alter their futures by spending it caretaking. I have family members who sacrificed a very significant amount of their adult lives taking care of their parents and missed out on their own lives and wrecked their own health doing it (it's hard mental and physical work, and in some cases can be very thankless). I also know people who gave up everything to take care of their parents and ended up homeless after their deaths.
    - toomuchtodo 7y ago
      I’ve structured my career (work from home, not management, no on call) and my finances (in my 30s) so when my father needs care (my mother has already passed), we’ll move him in with us and if I need to take time off to care for him, I can. This is an implicit generational contract IMHO. My parents raised and cared for me for a third of their life, it would be unreasonable to not do the same in return. Why would we expect others to do this work? Or that it would scale to do so?
      - deleted 7y ago
        [deleted]
      - jen_h 7y ago
        Have you also structured your finances so that you can take care of aunts and uncles and in-laws and grandparents? What about older relatives without help that live in different states? I think you're making a lot of assumptions about others here, and it (and all of the edits you're making to your comment) seems kind of silly and unnecessary. Have a nice night.
        toomuchtodo 7y ago
        Yes, I am willing and able to take in any family necessary, regardless of relation. If they’re unwilling to relocate, we are (I work from home, and we live light). I’m not saying it’s easy, by any means. I’m saying it’s necessary, unless you’re financially wealthy enough to outsource all of the support services elder care requires, which most people cannot (I am not at that wealth level, but I can take time off to provide care). My intent is not to poke at you specifically by any means, but to point out these are systemic problems the country will face as an older generation ages and the wealth doesn’t exist to provide them white glove service until death. The solution is not startups, it’s community and family (along with having enough savings, FMLA, and vacation time).
        msteffen 7y ago
        > the wealth doesn’t exist to provide them white glove service until death. The solution is not startups, it’s community and family (along with having enough savings, FMLA, and vacation time). The linked article seems to suggest that adult day cares actually work best when resources are limited, because they allow older people to be independent for longer (which is good regardless of the resources available): > When they both retired in 2004, they tried staying at home, but found it hard to manage on their own due to Beatriz’s bad knees, Guillermo’s health woes, including quintuple bypass surgery, and their youngest son Ray’s schizophrenia and depression. > ... > The prevalence of adult day cares in the Valley, which is 90 percent Hispanic, is part cultural, part economic. Hispanic seniors are more likely than Anglos to live at home with their children or other family members. The Valley also has a persistently high poverty rate and a percentage of seniors with diabetes, heart disease, depression and dementia that is alarmingly higher than the national average. > ... > Adult day cares like those in the Valley can offer a kind of middle way between round-the-clock care by family caregivers — who frequently burn out and experience physical and mental problems themselves — and expensive, sometimes impersonal nursing home care.
  - DoreenMichele 7y ago
    There can be gender differences at play. As a guess, jen_h sounds like a female name. Women tend to be saddled with caretaking work in a way that can easily be abusive. In some cultures, the social contract is that women get taken care of financially for doing the women's work, but that's not universal. White American culture can be very ugly about treating women like they are all undeserving, lazy mooches who need a paycheck on top of their obligation to provide care for relatives. Not all subcultures do that. So it's possible that there are both cultural and gender differences that involve a lot of implicit, baked in assumptions that neither of you are explicitly spelling out in comments and are the source of different viewpoints. Without addressing such, you may be unable to reach some kind of agreement because you can't even effectively communicate.
    - toomuchtodo 7y ago
      These are great points as usual. To be clear, my assumptions are simply that there are not enough available resources where elder care will be cheap and children will not be bothered with their care. Sacrifices will need to be made (but that’s an internal discussion for each family to make), and plans should be made accordingly. Hope for the best, but plan for the worst. Japan is a glimpse of what the future looks like, and technology/startups didn’t fix their elder care issues. People just die old, alone, and forgotten.
- Consultant32452 7y ago
  I believe this is an unsolvable problem. The math just doesn't work anymore. Back when exponential population growth was more of an option you'd just have 6 kids to spread the cost of elder care across. It doesn't matter whether you care for your parents or hire someone to, the fact of the matter is there is increasingly just not enough young people to provide the elder care and also perform the other kinds of productive work we need to get done in society.
  - crooked-v 7y ago
    Maybe we should start letting in all those young immigrants from demographics who have lots of children who want to move to the US.
    - jen_h 7y ago
      Not to mention...those who are already here contribute billions of dollars to Medicare and Social Security every year -- just their existence in this country helps seniors (unfortunately, so much of the propaganda pointed at older Americans buries this fact).
      - Consultant32452 7y ago
        I wonder if you'd have better luck if you told those older Americans that your goal was to redistribute the wealth of poor minorities from other countries to them.
    - Consultant32452 7y ago
      I'm pro immigrant, but this doesn't solve the problem. At best it postpones it slightly because as soon as those immigrants become a little more prosperous they stop having so many kids too.
      - DoreenMichele 7y ago
        If you "postpone" it often enough, that's basically the same as fixing it. Postpone means "fixing it for now, but not for all time." Fix it for now, then let tomorrow figure out how to postpone it again. That's only a problem if postponing it involves incurring worse future problems.
seltzered_ 7y ago
Honestly, one thing I’d like to see more of is cohousing projects out of the demographic shift. Theoretically there could be some leveraging of Qualified Opportunity Zone areas to help spur development, but ultimately the structure needs to be done in a way that serves community rather than maximizing profit.
colechristensen 7y ago
I wonder what that will do for communicable disease, a much increased population of immune weakened people.
newyankee 7y ago
Possibly one big market for robotics cos as well
jbob2000 7y ago
I disagree that we’ll see an uptick. The elderly care industry is very labour intensive. You can have software that, for example, makes it easier to track who the nurse should give medication to, but you still need a nurse to do it. You still need an orderly to clean their room when they crap on the floor. You still need 3 people to flip obese, bed-ridden grandpa on to his other side. You can have software that alerts you about care, or tracks progress, or stores patient information, but those things were never the expensive part of elderly care. The expensive part is always going to be paying a person to do X because elderly person can’t do X.

jen_h 7y ago

I really hope so. There's a huge need for a sea change in eldercare. My spouse and I have spent at least three months of this year helping older relatives, and I worry it'll consume a bigger chunk of next year. One interesting bright light is that a lot of the startups targeted towards younger people are actually godsends for senior independence -- grocery delivery, meal delivery, ridesharing. Not to mention how much cheaper it is to order assistive devices -- the very same assistive devices for a quarter of the price -- online vs. the local medical device rental places.

toomuchtodo 7y ago
> My spouse and I have spent at least three months of this year helping older relatives, and I worry it'll consume a bigger chunk of next year. I’m curious about this mindset. Why would you worry about it consuming more time? Isn’t that what family is for?
- jen_h 7y ago
  Most people want to be independent and to have their children and grandchildren to visit as guests, not full-time caregivers. We are very blessed that we're in the position to be able to easily pop from state to state helping and can work wherever we happen to be, but at the same time, they want to live their lives independently, too. Also, think about where caregivers might have to relocate and how they might alter their futures by spending it caretaking. I have family members who sacrificed a very significant amount of their adult lives taking care of their parents and missed out on their own lives and wrecked their own health doing it (it's hard mental and physical work, and in some cases can be very thankless). I also know people who gave up everything to take care of their parents and ended up homeless after their deaths.
  - toomuchtodo 7y ago
    I’ve structured my career (work from home, not management, no on call) and my finances (in my 30s) so when my father needs care (my mother has already passed), we’ll move him in with us and if I need to take time off to care for him, I can. This is an implicit generational contract IMHO. My parents raised and cared for me for a third of their life, it would be unreasonable to not do the same in return. Why would we expect others to do this work? Or that it would scale to do so?
    - deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]
    - jen_h 7y ago
      Have you also structured your finances so that you can take care of aunts and uncles and in-laws and grandparents? What about older relatives without help that live in different states? I think you're making a lot of assumptions about others here, and it (and all of the edits you're making to your comment) seems kind of silly and unnecessary. Have a nice night.
      - toomuchtodo 7y ago
        Yes, I am willing and able to take in any family necessary, regardless of relation. If they’re unwilling to relocate, we are (I work from home, and we live light). I’m not saying it’s easy, by any means. I’m saying it’s necessary, unless you’re financially wealthy enough to outsource all of the support services elder care requires, which most people cannot (I am not at that wealth level, but I can take time off to provide care). My intent is not to poke at you specifically by any means, but to point out these are systemic problems the country will face as an older generation ages and the wealth doesn’t exist to provide them white glove service until death. The solution is not startups, it’s community and family (along with having enough savings, FMLA, and vacation time).
        msteffen 7y ago
        > the wealth doesn’t exist to provide them white glove service until death. The solution is not startups, it’s community and family (along with having enough savings, FMLA, and vacation time). The linked article seems to suggest that adult day cares actually work best when resources are limited, because they allow older people to be independent for longer (which is good regardless of the resources available): > When they both retired in 2004, they tried staying at home, but found it hard to manage on their own due to Beatriz’s bad knees, Guillermo’s health woes, including quintuple bypass surgery, and their youngest son Ray’s schizophrenia and depression. > ... > The prevalence of adult day cares in the Valley, which is 90 percent Hispanic, is part cultural, part economic. Hispanic seniors are more likely than Anglos to live at home with their children or other family members. The Valley also has a persistently high poverty rate and a percentage of seniors with diabetes, heart disease, depression and dementia that is alarmingly higher than the national average. > ... > Adult day cares like those in the Valley can offer a kind of middle way between round-the-clock care by family caregivers — who frequently burn out and experience physical and mental problems themselves — and expensive, sometimes impersonal nursing home care.
- DoreenMichele 7y ago
  There can be gender differences at play. As a guess, jen_h sounds like a female name. Women tend to be saddled with caretaking work in a way that can easily be abusive. In some cultures, the social contract is that women get taken care of financially for doing the women's work, but that's not universal. White American culture can be very ugly about treating women like they are all undeserving, lazy mooches who need a paycheck on top of their obligation to provide care for relatives. Not all subcultures do that. So it's possible that there are both cultural and gender differences that involve a lot of implicit, baked in assumptions that neither of you are explicitly spelling out in comments and are the source of different viewpoints. Without addressing such, you may be unable to reach some kind of agreement because you can't even effectively communicate.
  - toomuchtodo 7y ago
    These are great points as usual. To be clear, my assumptions are simply that there are not enough available resources where elder care will be cheap and children will not be bothered with their care. Sacrifices will need to be made (but that’s an internal discussion for each family to make), and plans should be made accordingly. Hope for the best, but plan for the worst. Japan is a glimpse of what the future looks like, and technology/startups didn’t fix their elder care issues. People just die old, alone, and forgotten.
Consultant32452 7y ago
I believe this is an unsolvable problem. The math just doesn't work anymore. Back when exponential population growth was more of an option you'd just have 6 kids to spread the cost of elder care across. It doesn't matter whether you care for your parents or hire someone to, the fact of the matter is there is increasingly just not enough young people to provide the elder care and also perform the other kinds of productive work we need to get done in society.
- crooked-v 7y ago
  Maybe we should start letting in all those young immigrants from demographics who have lots of children who want to move to the US.
  - jen_h 7y ago
    Not to mention...those who are already here contribute billions of dollars to Medicare and Social Security every year -- just their existence in this country helps seniors (unfortunately, so much of the propaganda pointed at older Americans buries this fact).
    - Consultant32452 7y ago
      I wonder if you'd have better luck if you told those older Americans that your goal was to redistribute the wealth of poor minorities from other countries to them.
  - Consultant32452 7y ago
    I'm pro immigrant, but this doesn't solve the problem. At best it postpones it slightly because as soon as those immigrants become a little more prosperous they stop having so many kids too.
    - DoreenMichele 7y ago
      If you "postpone" it often enough, that's basically the same as fixing it. Postpone means "fixing it for now, but not for all time." Fix it for now, then let tomorrow figure out how to postpone it again. That's only a problem if postponing it involves incurring worse future problems.

seltzered_ 7y ago

Honestly, one thing I’d like to see more of is cohousing projects out of the demographic shift. Theoretically there could be some leveraging of Qualified Opportunity Zone areas to help spur development, but ultimately the structure needs to be done in a way that serves community rather than maximizing profit.

colechristensen 7y ago

I wonder what that will do for communicable disease, a much increased population of immune weakened people.

newyankee 7y ago

Possibly one big market for robotics cos as well

jbob2000 7y ago

I disagree that we’ll see an uptick. The elderly care industry is very labour intensive. You can have software that, for example, makes it easier to track who the nurse should give medication to, but you still need a nurse to do it. You still need an orderly to clean their room when they crap on the floor. You still need 3 people to flip obese, bed-ridden grandpa on to his other side. You can have software that alerts you about care, or tracks progress, or stores patient information, but those things were never the expensive part of elderly care. The expensive part is always going to be paying a person to do X because elderly person can’t do X.