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I hear what you're saying, and I think american cultural relationships with the elderly is made more complex by our leveraging of end of life care to prolong ex
by kingkawn 14y ago
I hear what you're saying, and I think american cultural relationships with the elderly is made more complex by our leveraging of end of life care to prolong existence long past self-sustainability. If you've got someone who is being kept alive through severe morbidity, you really have no option but significant professional care. Nursing Homes are expensive, but compared to home-care they are a bargain. Many of the families who place their older relatives into assisted living or nursing homes feel great guilt about the decision, but financially don't know how else to make it work given their relative's needs.
Professional group care facilities are also a symptom of the steady loss of purchasing power for the middle class and those who have less means. We can point fingers at the baseness of the decision to put relatives into these institutions, but the alternatives of home-based care are almost exclusively available to the wealthy, so it ends up being a class-based critique that could do more to empathize with the financial and emotional toll these decisions take.
American culture is not perfect in this regard at all, and I think your point about a general stigma against multigenerational living is well-made. I also think that it's more complex than selfishness or corruption. I'm sure though that we could find some examples of people who prove me wrong and are just assholes to their grandparents, but I don't think that's representative of the general population.
- benched 14y agoI don't understand this. We are caring for my grandfather in his home precisely because we cannot afford the astronomical cost of a nursing home (around $10,000 per month).
- rdtsc 14y agoThe decision is usually made to let them go on medicare, which then starts to liquidate their estate until it is gone and then they start paying from there.
- purplelobster 14y agoTen THOUSAND dollars per month? You have got to be kidding me. Please tell me you are.
- kingkawn 14y agoNo, that is actually somewhat normal. Even low-end assisted living institutional care is probably $5k/month
- rayiner 14y agoI agree it makes things more complex, but we aren't in fact pro-longing our lives that much. Life expectancy for whites (to take out the effect of demographic changes) at age 65 has gone up all of 5 years since 1950, and life expectancy at age 75 has gone up less than 2 years since 1980 (http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/hus/2011/022.pdf http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/hus/2011/022.pdf). Indeed, even much of that difference can be explained by advances in treatment of relatively mundane things like heart attacks that would otherwise kill people in their late 60's, rather than complex care to extend life at the end. That is to say that much of the difference is due to more people making it to 70 and less due to more people making it to 90+.
- kingkawn 14y agoWith you all the way, overall longevity is much the same, but the way we go has changed a great deal. I don't know if I'd consider heart attacks mundane, they've just become that given western diets. heart attack used to be rarer 100 years ago, but now a combination of longer life and diets that have more negative cardiac impact leads to the growth of heart attack and the subsequent research and improvement in cardiac intervention that can be seen in healthcare today. We've made them mundane through our collective wild ass lifestyle choices.