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> The answer is simple: Elder care should be a publicly delivered service. It is. Medicare pays for almost all Elder care. Which of course is the problem - pri
by ars 4y ago
> The answer is simple: Elder care should be a publicly delivered service.
It is. Medicare pays for almost all Elder care. Which of course is the problem - private pay nursing homes are way better than the publicly funded ones because Medicare pays far less.
Or at you implying that the Government should directly own nursing homes, and hire the staff directly? That has a whole different set of problems - don't advocate for that without understand what you are asking.
You end up with centralized decision making for something very local.
You are misunderstanding the problem - the issue is not privatization, the issue is that Medicare does not pay enough, and nursing homes try to find private pay clients to make up the shortfall.
- BaseballPhysics 4y ago> You are misunderstanding the problem - the issue is not privatization, the issue is that Medicare does not pay enough, and nursing homes try to find private pay clients to make up the shortfall. It's both. America has chosen the worst of both worlds: public under-funding and private delivery. Private delivery leads to cutting corners to maximize profits. Lack of sufficient public funding exacerbates the issue. The solution is to fix the public funding problem by properly investing in the system, and killing private delivery.
- mindslight 4y agonit: Medicaid. Medicare will pay for inpatient rehab after hospital stays and the like, but long term care essentially requires becoming destitute so that Medicaid will pay. A large part of middle-upper-middle class "estate planning" consists of passing wealth to kids well before the lookback period. The private pay burn rate is like $150k/yr last time I checked. I don't think there is any easy answer. Spending drastically more on the problem is necessary, but obviously not sufficient. Then again, dying from laying in your own feces ("bed sores") when you're 80+ years old isn't the worst way to go out in the US.